giant's
life was a wasted one, yet in his very death he was true to his mission,
and fulfilled the purpose of his birth. In other lands and in other
times the satirist is recognised and his work appraised; the abuses he
scourged, the pretensions he ridiculed, are seen in all their
hideousness; but when a great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe
the ulcers of pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things,
touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. Why should the
_cloth_--as it is so ingenuously called--be touched with delicate hands,
unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the
eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the
Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties;
he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time.

Let us have done with all this timidity and coward tenderness. If the
Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within
its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe
of the _cloth_, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a
pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage
of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country,
rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the
Church's martyrs that have handed down through the ages the light of the
world.

The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns attacked were evils
insidious and poisonous, eating to the very heart of the religious life
of the country, and they required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful
that the remedy was applied in time; and, looking to the righteousness
he wrought, let us bless the name of Burns.

Burns's father, stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict
Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious
Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William
Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical
Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too
loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and
unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that day has
been here softened down into something not very far from Arminianism. He
had had a hard experience in the world himself, and that may have drawn
him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into closer communion with