Those two affirmations are unique in their quality and power because they are unadulterated and underived; and because his whole life, in other respects so casually conducted, maintained an unwavering simple loyalty to their spirit from beginning to end. His assertion of the sovereignty of free manhood, though made in vindication of the poor, was inspired by no ignoble envy of the rich; nor was it conveyed from anybody’s scheme of political thinking. It was the natural forthright consequence of his own vivid intuition of what it was to be a man, and of what were the inalienable moral properties that must go with that estate. Thus it had a broader groundwork of reason than philosophy can compass, and was a deliverance of truth not from an accumulation of examples, but from the very centre of mind. So, too, with his exaltation of the Kind Heart above all the crowd of formal virtues. It was no mere reaction from the religious teaching of his place and day, which scowled so darkly upon human nature and made merit in the sight of God—goodness it could hardly be called—consist in a preservative acidulation of the soul and a sacred lack of sympathy with sinners. It was a protest also against the moral system and judgments of society at large; which set a high value on the qualities by which a man gets and keeps, but leave out of estimate and precept alike the qualities in which humanity fulfils itself. From this it continually follows, and is everywhere to be seen, that the “respected citizen” may be a man in whom there is very little to respect and still less to like; nor is it for any other reason than this that the word respectability has come to mean a destitution of passions, sympathies and ideals, the salted dead-sea level of social safety and acceptance. But Burns, with his lot cast among simple people, stood where he could see the _primordia rerum_ of the moral and social qualities at work in their essential character and aspect, and could judge more securely than the world judges of their worth and drift. Therefore it is with the observation of a peasant and the authority of a poet—of one, that is, whose sonship to Nature is an immediate reality, importing a command of secret sources and an added intellectual power—that he confronts the religious and the worldly wise alike to tell them that neither in what the one chiefly inculcates nor in what the other chiefly rewards, but just in the primal kindness of heart that may be found among the simple and even among sinners, lies the superlative attribute and exercise of human nature: that in which it continues Nature’s own beneficence: that in which it approaches the Divine: that without which it falls short of being human, for all its virtues.