When Burns followed up ‘The Twa Herds’ with ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The Ordination’, and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the applause redoubled, and so did the enmity of the Old Lights. The man who challenges established institutions to their face needs to be sure of his own position. Burns’s indiscretion with Betty Paton not only left him wide open to counter-attack but assured him of far more unpleasant notoriety than ordinarily accompanied such lapses in peasant Scotland. It was impossible to remain in the parish without submitting to the discipline of the Kirk. Even at its mildest the ordeal of three successive penitential appearances before Mauchline congregation would have been intensely humiliating to a man as sensitively proud as Burns. But a young bachelor’s slips from grace were not usually treated very seriously except by the clergy and the Holy Willies. Had Burns been otherwise in good standing in the community he would have been able to go on much as before, but when the evidence of his breach of sexual morality was augmented by his ill-fame as a derider of the church he became, among all the more conservative members of the parish, little better than an outcast. He may not have realized the full bitterness of the feeling against him until his repudiation by the Armours in the spring of 1786, but he realized enough. His reaction was as inevitable as the community’s had been. If he was to be an outcast he would live up to his reputation. Many of his biographers since, as well as many of his neighbours at the time, have taken at face value the blatant pride in his ill-repute which marks such poems as the ‘Epistle to John Rankine’. But this was not part of his real nature; he was simply brazening out his humiliation. The unco guid had decided that he was a dog with a bad name. He would show them that they had underestimated his capacity to shock them. That in the process he would make the parish too hot to hold him was a consideration not likely to occur to him in the full tide of his resentment.