Robert Burns | Page 7

of his works it is painful to read on one page the
pathetic lines which he engraved on his father's headstone, and a few
pages on, written almost at the same time, the epistle above alluded to,
and other poems in the same strain, in which the defiant poet glories in
his shame. It was well for the old man that he was laid in Alloway
Kirkyard before these things befell. But the widowed mother had to
bear the burden, and to receive in her home and bring up the child that
should not have been born. When silence and shame would have most
become him, Burns poured forth his feelings in ribald verses, and
bitterly satirized the parish minister, who required him to undergo that
public penance which the discipline of the Church at that time exacted.
Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame attached to the
minister, who merely carried out the rules which his Church enjoined.
It was no proof of magnanimity in Burns to use his talent in reviling the
minister, who had done nothing more than his duty. One can hardly
doubt but that in his inmost heart he must have been visited with other
and more penitential feelings than those unseemly verses express. But,
as Lockhart has well observed, "his false pride recoiled from letting his
jovial associates know (p. 017) how little he was able to drown the
whispers of the still small voice; and the fermenting bitterness of a
mind ill at ease within himself escaped--as may be often traced in the
history of satirists--in angry sarcasms against those who, whatever their
private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong." Mr. Carlyle's
comment on this crisis of his life is too weighty to be omitted here.
"With principles assailed by evil example from without, by 'passions
raging like demons' from within, he had little need of sceptical
misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his
retreat if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence;
his mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides
there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him.
Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; his character
for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can
even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge
consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies.
The blackest desperation gathers over him, broken only by the red
lightnings of remorse." Amid this trouble it was but a poor vanity and

miserable love of notoriety which could console itself with the thought
The mair they talk, I'm kent the better, E'en let them clash.
Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self-reproach?
This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, and the
bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at once launched
Burns into the troubled sea of religious controversy that was at that
time raging all around him. The clergy of the West were divided into
two parties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. (p. 018)
Ayrshire and the west of Scotland had long been the stronghold of
Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; and in Burns's day--a
century and a half after the Covenant--a large number of the ministers
still adhered to its principles, and preached the Puritan theology
undiluted. These men were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and
stout protestors against Patronage, which has always been the bugbear
of the sects in Scotland. As Burns expresses it, they did their best to stir
up their flocks to
Join their counsel and their skills To cowe the lairds, An' get the brutes
the power themsels To chuse their herds.
All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the side of those
who wished to resist patronage and "to cowe the lairds," had not this
his natural tendency been counteracted by a stronger bias drawing him
in an opposite direction. The Auld Lights, though democrats in Church
politics, were the upholders of that strict church discipline under which
he was smarting, and to this party belonged his own minister, who had
brought that discipline to bear upon him. Burns, therefore, naturally
threw himself into the arms of the opposite, or New Light party, who
were more easy in their life and in their doctrine. This large and
growing section of ministers were deeply imbued with rationalism, or,
as they then called it, "common-sense," in the light of which they pared
away from religion all that was mysterious and supernatural. Some of
them were said to be Socinians or even pure Deists, most of