66 has to offer. 15. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. 16. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. 17. For the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.' When he gives lessons to a young man for his conduct in life, one of them is, The great Creator to adore;" when he consoles a friend on the death of a relative, "he points the brimful grief-worn eyes to scenes beyond the grave;" when he expresses benevolence to a distressed family, he beseeches the aid of Him "who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb;" when he feels the need of aid to control his passions, he implores that of the "Great Governor of all below;" when in sickness, he has a prayer for the pardon of his errors, and an expression of confidence in the goodness of God; when suffering from the ills of life, he asks for the grace of resignation, "because they are thy will;" when he observes the sufferings of the virtuous, he remembers a rectifying futurity;-he is religious not only when surprised by occasions such as these, but also on set occasions; he had regular worship in his family while at Ellisland-we know not how it was at Dumfries, but we do know that there he catechised his children every Sabbath evening; nay, he does not enter a Druidical circle without a prayer to God. He viewed the Creator chiefly in his attributes of love, goodness, and mercy. "In proportion as we are wrung with grief, or distracted with anxiety, the ideas of a superintending Deity, an Almighty protector, are doubly dear." Him he never lost sight of or confidence in, even in the depths of his remorse. An avenging God was too seldom in his contemplations-from the little severity in his own character-from a philosophical view of the inscrutable causes of human frailty—and most of all, from a diseased aversion to what was so much the theme of the sour Calvinism around him; but which would have risen up an appalling truth in such a soul as his, had it been habituated to profounder thought on the mysterious corruption of our fallen nature. Sceptical thoughts as to revealed religion had assailed his mind, while with expanding powers it "communed with the glorious universe;" and in 1787 he writes from Edinburgh to a Mr James M'Candlish, student in physic, College, Glasgow," who had favoured him with a long argumentative infidel letter: "I, likewise, since you and I were first acquainted, in the pride of despising old women's stories, ventured on 'the daring path Spinoza trod;' but experience of the weakness, not the strength of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion." When at Ellisland he writes to Mrs Dunlop: "My idle reasonings sometimes make me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my heart always give the cold philosophisings the lie. Who looks for the heart weaned from earth; the soul affianced to her God; the correspondence fixed with heaven; the pious supplication and devout thanksgiving, constant as the vicissitudes of even and morn ;—who thinks to meet with these in the court, the palace, in the glare of public life! No: to find them in their precious importance and divine efficacy, we must search among the obscure recesses of disappointment, affliction, poverty, and distress." And again, next year, from the same place to the same correspondent: "That there is an incomprehensibly Great Being, to whom I owe my existence, and that he must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery and consequent outward deportment of this creature he has made these are, I think, self-evident propositions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue, and consequently that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay positive injustice, in the administration of affairs, both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave, must I think be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment's reflection. I will go farther, and affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of His doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though to appearance he was himself the obscurest and most illiterate of our species therefore Jesus was from God." Indeed, all his best letters to Mrs Dunlop are full of the expression of religious feeling and religious faith; though it must be confessed with pain, that he speaks with more confidence in the truth of natural than of revealed religion, and too often lets sentiments : inadvertently escape him, that, taken by themselves, would imply that his religious belief was but a Christianised Theism. Of the immortality of the soul he never expresses any serious doubt, though now and then his expressions, though beautiful, want their usual force, as if he felt the inadequacy of the human mind to the magnitude of the theme. "Ye venerable sages, and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike baseless visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering idea this of the world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it as I ardently wish it." How, then, could honoured Thomas Carlyle bring himself to affirm "that Burns had no religion?" His religion was in much imperfect-but its incompleteness you discern only in a survey of all his effusions, and by inference; for his particular expressions of a religious kind are genuine, and as acknowledg ments of the superabundant goodness and greatness of God, they are in unison with the sentiments of the devoutest Christian. But remorse never suggests to him the inevitable corruption of man; Christian humility he too seldom dwells on, though without it there cannot be Christian faith; and he is silent on the need of reconcilement between the divine attributes of Justice and Mercy. The absence of all this might pass unnoticed, were not the religious sentiment so prevalent in his confidential communications with his friends in his most serious and solemn moods. In them there is frequent, habitual recognition of the Creator; and who that finds joy and beauty in nature has not the same? It may be well supposed that if common men are more ideal in religion than in other things, so would be Burns. He who lent the colours of his fancy to common things, would not withhold them from divine. Something he knew not what he would exact of man-more impressively reverential than anything he is wont to offer to God, or perhaps can offer in the way of institution in temples made with hands. The heartfelt adoration always has a grace for him-in the silent bosom— in the lonely cottage-in any place where circumstances are a pledge of its reality; but the moment it ceases to be heartfelt, and visibly so, it loses his respect, it seems as profanation. "Mine is the religion of the breast; " and if it be not, what is it worth? But it must also revive a right spirit within us; and there may be gratitude for goodness without such change as is required of us in the gospel. He was too buoyant with immortal spirit within him, not to credit its immortal destination; he was too thoughtful in his human love not to feel how different must be our affections if they are towards flowers which the blast of death may wither, or towards spirits which are but beginning to live in our sight, and are gathering good and evil here for an eternal life. Burns believed that by his own unassisted understanding, and his own unassisted heart, he saw and felt those great truths, forgetful of this great truth, that he had been taught them in the Written Word. Had all he learned in the "auld clay biggin " become a blank—all the knowledge inspired into his heart during the evenings, when "the sire turned o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, the big ha'bible, ance his father's pride," how little or how much would he then have known of God and Immortality? In that delusion he shared more or less with one and all-whether poets or philosophers-who have put their trust in natural Theology. As to the glooms in which his sceptical reason had been involved, they do not seem to have been so thickso dense-as in the case of men without number who have by the blessing of God become true Christians. Of his levities on certain celebrations of religious rites, we before ventured an explanation; and while it is to be lamented that he did not more frequently dedicate the genius that shed so holy a lustre over "The Cottar's Saturday Night," to the service of religion, let it be remembered how few poets have done so―alas! too few-that he, like his tuneful brethren, must often have been deterred by a sense of his own unworthiness from approaching its awful mysteries-and above all, that he was called to his account before he had attained his thoughtful prime. And now that we are approaching the close of our Memoir, it may be well for a little while clearly to consider Burns's position in this world of ours, where we humans often find ourselves, we cannot tell how, in strange positions; and where there are on all hands so many unintelligible things going on, that in all languages an active existence is assumed of such powers as Chance, Fortune, and Fate. Was he more unhappy than the generality of gifted men? In what did that un happiness consist? others? How far was it owing to himself or We have seen that up to early manhood his life was virtuous, and therefore must have been happy-that by magnanimously enduring a hard lot, he made it veritably a light one-and that though subject "to a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made him fly to solitude," he enjoyed the society of his own humble sphere with proportionate enthusiasm, and even then derived deep delight from his genius. That genius quickly waxed strong, and very suddenly he was in full power as a poet. No sooner was passion indulged than it prevailed-and he who had so often felt during his abstinent sore-toiled youth that "a blink of rest's a sweet enjoyment," had now often to rue the selfbrought trouble that banishes rest even from the bed of labour, whose sleep would otherwise be without a dream. "I have for some time been pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know-the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when attention is not called away by the calls of society, or the vagaries of the Muse." These agonies had a well-known particular cause, but his errors were frequent, and to his own eyes flagrant-yet he was no irreligious person-and exclaimed: “Oh! thou great, unknown Power! thou Almighty God! who hast lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of thy works, yet thou hast never left me nor forsaken me." What signified it to him that he was then very poor? The worst evils of poverty are moral evils, and them he then knew not; nay, in that school he was trained to many virtues, which might not have been so conspicuous even in his noble nature, but for that severest nurture. Shall we ask, what signified it to him that he was very poor to the last? Alas! it signified much; for when a poor man becomes a husband and a father, a new heart is created within him, and he often finds himself trembling in fits of unendurable, because unavailing fears. Of such anxieties Burns suffered much; yet better men than Burns - better because sober and more religious - have suffered far more; nor in their humility and resignation did |