In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century and a Scot of his century. The rigidity of the Kirk, so unlike the comfortable looseness of Anglican theology, left him no place within its pale, even though he never openly severed his connexion. As a youth he had, along with most of his countrymen, read popular works of divinity like Boston’s _Four-Fold State_, Fisher’s _Marrow of Modern Divinity_, and Cole _On God’s Sovereignty_. In 1791, when his rural neighbours of the Monkland Friendly Society insisted on adding these and other books to their co-operative library, Burns obediently ordered them from Peter Hill, and lumped them all together as ‘damned trash’. Though he told James Candlish in 1787 that after having ‘in the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring path Spinoza trod”; ... experience of the weakness, not the strength, of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion,’ it was not the revelation of the Kirk. Not even his infatuation for Clarinda, though it made him momentarily qualify his admiration for Milton’s Satan, could compel him to bow the knee to Calvin. ‘Mine’, he told her when she undertook to preach orthodoxy to him, ‘is the Religion of the bosom.--I hate the very idea of controversial divinity; as I firmly believe, that every honest, upright man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.--If your verses, as you seem to hint, contain censure, except you want an occasion to break with me, don’t send them.... “Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish it.’ His fullest statement approximating to orthodoxy was written to Mrs. Dunlop in 1789: