“‘Owning her weakness,
Her evil behaviour;
And leaving, with meekness,
Her soul to her Saviour.’”
A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,” presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and “doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on damnatory sentences de mortuis, even when there remains nought to show—
... “save a life misspent,—
And soul—but who shall answer where it went?
’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they
Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way,
Unless those bullies of eternal pains