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comprehend, but whose relation to us is Guide and Saviour.' That is not the language of an orthodox man. To Mrs. Dunlop he confessed his faith in Jesus as from God' on account of the 'sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts,' but added nothing indicative of a belief in the Deity of Jesus or in vicarious atonement.

If, then, we read the lines of The Cotter's Saturday Night which refer to Jesus in the light of these explicit declarations, we shall see that they are not to be taken in an orthodox sense, but as having quite a different import. The theology of the poem is essentially unorthodox. Though we have the fear of the Lord spoken of, the feeling indicated is not the abject dread of the slave in presence of the despot, not terror before an angry Deity who can cast into hell, not a fear of any cowering sort, but the natural and healthy awe of the finite facing the Infinite. It is a trusty reverence given to him

Who made the heart: 'tis He alone

Decidedly can try us;

He knows each chord its various tone,

Each spring its various bias,

one to be looked up to, therefore, with filial confidence.

Wherein for us, then, does the essential meaning and message of the poem lie? The poem is first of all an argument for personal liberty in religion. It says to the Kirk and the Presbyter: 'Stand off with your dogmas and leave the individual free to think for himself and come to his own conclusions.' It is a correction of the Protestantism which, in its turn, had become Popish by setting up a creed as an absolute authority over the conscience. It is a vindication of the right of reason in the sight of God, a plea for personal religion. The deep-seeing Cotter saw that the first thing to be respected for religion's sake was not the Kirk, nor even the Bible, but personal faculty, the constitution, the spiritual power of the individual.

He discerned that Truth comes in different ways to different men and different ages, and therefore it was absurd to set up a perpetual dogmatic standard to

which all must conform their thought. Each mind, having its own form and quality, should be free to assimilate Truth according to its particular characteristics; and each age, according to its own intelligence, should be at liberty to have its own ideas. An enforced uniformity of belief is a suppression of natural faculties, the reduction of all minds to an unhealthy flatness.

The Cotter studied his own children and became their teacher and priest. For their sake he thought out the theological question and made a speciality of religion in his training. The solution of religious education is here. It belongs primarily to parents to educate the religious faculties of their children, to watch their dispositions, and evoke the religious spirit in the line of their particular faculties. If they cannot do it themselves, they should secure its doing by others. By parental indifferentism children are committed to the dogmatists and are taught the authorized falsities. Thus, as has been truly said. 'Every year rolls up its steady average

of abuses unreformed, evils unchanged, falsities laughed at and maintained.' Religious progress is made, but it is as nothing compared with the progress that would be made if all the thinkers and educated people of the community were to seriously set themselves to the work of securing to their families, especially their children, the full benefits of their best knowledge, treating every attempt to teach them fashionable falsities as they would an attempt to indoctrinate them in sorcery.' That is the example set before us in The Cotter's Saturday Night-an example as prophetic as it is admirable.

The poem is not an argument for stated times and forms of worship in the home, but is an example of parental concern regarding religion, of serious thought on religious questions and of earnest effort for religious education. Taking the words of the poem in a large sense, it must always be from that sort of spiritual solicitude that 'Scotia's grandeur springs.' The real grandeur of Scottish religious history and the virtue of Scottish character are not to

be found in their dogmatism and conventionality, but in the spirit that always resisted these. Not in the line of conformity, but of nonconformity, does the glory of Scottish religious life lie. From its heretics, not from its creedalists, has the vitality come which regenerated the Scottish soul. Always from the rationalist, the reformer, the pioneer, do the new light and life come. Multiply men of the stamp of William Burness, men who think for themselves, who take pains to verify their thoughts and teach their children to be rational in their piety; make such men the majority in our country, and there would be a new Scotland, a land with a real religion, a piety without bigotry, a worship with great truth in it.

Orthodoxy has terrified people against thinking by saying: If you cast off the creeds, you will sink into Atheism; if you doubt what you have been taught, you will become an infidel; if you begin to pick and choose in the Bible, you will grow into a blackguard.' We can call William Burness to testify that it need not be so.

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