Despite his constant citing of Young’s exhortation, ‘On Reason build Resolve’, Burns’s approach to life and ideas was always emotional and not intellectual. When he described himself in 1786 as having little of divinity ‘except a pretty large portion of honour and an enthusiastic, incoherent Benevolence,’ his self-analysis had his customary accuracy. To him, as to the New England Unitarians and to a man like Mark Twain, escape from the orthodoxy of his youth had come as a relief and not as a loss. Calvinism had erected a system of thought as rigidly deductive as the science of geometry. Starting from certain ‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority for salvation--for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human righteousness were filthy rags. This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice, as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. It seemed to him that the New Lights were ‘squaring Religion by the rules of Common Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’ But in investing their deity with human benevolence and loving-kindness, the New Lights were also, again like the New England Unitarians, more or less unwittingly surrendering the supernatural sanctions of religion and assimilating their ideas to those of the Deists. God was the ‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.