Throughout his life Burns managed always to acquire a maximum of ill-repute with a minimum of actual transgression. It was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously. Sometimes the conspicuousness was mere ill-luck. A fair portion, for instance, of the Edinburgh gossip which clung to his name may well have originated in the fact that both the servant girls with whom he had relations in the city brought legal action against him--a consequence he could scarcely have foreseen. On the other hand, his desire to startle the parish frequently bore fruit in suspicions and enmities impossible to live down. G. K. Chesterton once advised the village genius who wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, not to come up to London but to stay at home and have a row with the rector. This was precisely what Burns did. The New Light doctrines which soft-pedalled such Calvinistic dogmas as predestination had already conquered Edinburgh and Glasgow and were beginning to invade the provinces. In any case Burns’s saturation in the sentimentalism of Mackenzie and Sterne would have made him receptive to the New Light emphasis on Benevolence and the Moral Sense. But when the congeniality of the new doctrines was joined with an opportunity to startle his neighbours the combination was irresistible. He began, he says, to debate theology with such heat and indiscretion as to raise a cry of heresy which persisted in Tarbolton and Mauchline as long as he remained there. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, pictures him in the kirkyard between services, expounding heretical doctrines with such vigour as to elicit hisses and cries of ‘Shame!’ from his auditors. At least the story is true in spirit. Burns was determined to be conspicuous, even if it meant hisses instead of applause.