I'll warrant them ye're nae deceiver,
A steady, sturdy, staunch believer.
The period within which these satires were written was short—1785 and 1786; but some three years later, on the prosecution of a liberal minister, Doctor McGill of Ayr, for the publication of A Practical Essay on the Death of Jesus Christ, which was charged with teaching Unitarianism, Burns took up the theme again. The Kirk's Alarm is a rattling “ballad,” full of energy and scurrilous wit, but, like many of its kind, it has lost much of its interest through the great amount of personal detail. A few stanzas will show that, even after his absence from local politics during his Edinburgh sojourn, he had lost none of his gusto in belaboring the Ayrshire Calvinists.
Orthodox, Orthodox, wha believe in John Knox,
Let me sound an alarm to your conscience:
There's a heretic blast has been blawn i' the wast,
That what is not sense must be nonsense.
Dr. Mac, Dr. Mac, you should stretch on a rack,
To strike evil-doers wi' terror;
To join faith and sense upon any pretence,