flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike baseless visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering idea this of the world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it as I ardently wish it." How, then, could honored Thomas Carlyle bring himself to affirm, "that Burns had no religion?" His religion was in much imperfect--but its incompleteness you discern only on a survey of all his effusions, and by inference; for his particular expressions of a religious kind are genuine, and as acknowledgments of the superabundant goodness and greatness of God, they are in unison with the sentiments of the devoutest Christian. But remorse never suggests to him the inevitable corruption of man; Christian humility he too seldom dwells on, though without it there cannot be Christian faith: and he is silent on the need of reconcilement between the divine attributes of Justice and Mercy. The absence of all this might pass unnoticed, were not the religious sentiment so prevalent in his confidential communications with his friends in his most serious and solemn moods. In them there is frequent, habitual recognition of the Creator; and who that finds joy and beauty in nature has not the same? It may be well supposed that if common men are more ideal in religion than in other things, so would be Burns. He who has lent the colors of his fancy to common things, would not withhold them from divine. Something--he knew not what--he would exact of man--more impressively reverential than anything he is wont to offer to God, or perhaps can offer in the way of institution--in temples made with hands. The _heartfelt_ adoration always has a grace for him--in the silent bosom--in the lonely cottage--in any place where circumstances are a pledge of its reality; but the moment it ceases to be _heartfelt_, and visibly so, it loses his respect, it seems as profanation. "Mine is the religion of the breast;" and if it be not, what is it worth? But it must also revive a right spirit within us; and there may be gratitude for goodness, without such change as is required of us in the gospel. He was too buoyant with immortal spirit within him not to credit its immortal destination; he was too thoughtful in his human love not to feel how different must be our affections if they are towards flowers which the blast of death may wither, or towards spirits which are but beginning to live in our sight, and are gathering good and evil here for an eternal life. Burns believed that by his own unassisted understanding, and his own unassisted heart, he saw and felt those great truths, forgetful of this great truth, that he had been taught them in the Written Word. Had all he learned in the "auld clay biggin" become a blank--all the knowledge inspired into his heart during the evenings,