Burns was a Religious Man.
‘Burns a religious man!’ scoffers exclaim. ‘He was a drunkard.’ Burns was a moderate drinker compared with most of the ministers of his time. If drinking whisky was a disqualification for religious character in the time of Burns, a large proportion of the ministers of his time were disqualified. Burns should not, in all fairness, be judged by the standards of our time. More than fifty years after Burns died it was customary for even Methodist ministers in Canada, when visiting the members of their churches, to accept a little whisky punch as an evidence of good fellowship and comradeship. This custom persisted in Scotland and England for more than a century after Burns died, and in many places it exists still. In a letter to Mr William Cruickshank in 1788 he said: ‘I have fought my way severely through the savage hospitality of this country—the object of all hosts being to send every guest to bed drunk if they can.’
Burns was not speaking of hotel-keepers, but of homes of people of high respectability. He wrote in 1793: ‘Taverns I have totally abandoned, but it is the private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking gentlemen of the country that do me the mischief.’
He did occasionally go to the Globe Tavern in Dumfries after 1793, when the guest of visitors who came to Dumfries solely for the purpose of meeting him and having the honour of entertaining him.
In his short life of Burns, Alexander Smith says: ‘If he drank hard, it was in an age when hard drinking was fashionable. If he sinned in this respect, he sinned in company with English Prime Ministers, Scotch Lords of Session, grave dignitaries of the Church in both countries, and thousands of ordinary blockheads who went to their graves in the odour of sanctity, and whose epitaphs are a catalogue of all the virtues.’
Burns spoke with all sincerity, in a letter to his friend Samuel Clark of Dumfries, when he wrote: ‘Some of our folks about the Excise office, Edinburgh, had, and perhaps still have, conceived a prejudice against me as being a drunken, dissipated character. I might be all this, you know, and yet be an honest fellow; but you know that I am an honest fellow, and am nothing of this.’ His superiors in the Excise department gave him a high record for accuracy and honesty in his work.
Other objectors say: ‘He could not be religious, because he attacked religion.’ This statement is not correct. He attacked the evils that in his time robbed religion of its vital power, but never religion. Emerson says: ‘Not Luther, not Latimer, struck stronger blows against false theology than did the poet Burns.’
To Clarinda, Burns wrote: ‘I hate the superstition of a fanatic, but I love the religion of a man.’
In his poem ‘The Tree of Liberty’ he lays the blame of the terrible degradation of the French peasantry on
Superstition’s wicked brood.
In his ‘Epistle to John Goudie’ he speaks of
Poor gapin’, glowrin’ superstition.
He attacked superstition, but not religion.
He attacked hypocrisy, and true men are grateful to him because he did so.
In his ‘Epistle to Rev. John M’Math,’ the ‘New Licht’ minister of Tarbolton, Burns says:
God knows I’m not the thing I should be,
Nor am I ev’n the thing I could be;
But twenty times I rather would be
An atheist clean,
Than under gospel colours hid be
Just for a screen.
He ridiculed hypocrisy, and we are grateful to him for doing so. Nothing more contemptible than a religious hypocrite can be made of a being created in the image of God. Hypocrisy is not religion.
He attacked bigotry, one of the most savage monsters that ever tried to block the way of Christ’s highest teaching, the brotherhood of man. No phenomenal religious absurdity is more incomprehensible than the idea that Christianity can be promoted by the multiplication of religious denominations; especially when, as in the time of Burns, and long after his time, leaders of so-called Christian denominations refused to have fellowship with each other, or to unite on a common platform in working for the promotion of Christian ideals. How trivial the formalisms of theologians seem that kept men apart whom Christ desired to become co-operative and loving brothers, working harmoniously together for the achievement of the great visions he revealed!
He wrote to Clarinda, 1788: ‘I hate the very idea of a controversial divinity; and I firmly believe that every upright, honest man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.’
In his ‘Epistle to John Goudie’ Burns calls bigotry
Sour bigotry on its last legs.
He wrote this in 1785, and much more than a century later bigotry is still on its legs, but it is tottering to its final overthrow. Burns attacked bigotry, but not religion.
He attacked the doctrine of predestination, as taught in his time, a most soul-dwarfing doctrine, calculated to rob humanity of motives to stimulate it to greater and nobler efforts to achieve for God. He makes Holy Willie say he deserved damnation five thousand years before he was born. Few people now regard predestination as an element in vital religion.
He attacked one of the most horribly blasphemous doctrines ever preached, but preached in the time of Burns, and long after:
That God sends ane to heaven and ten to hell
For His ain glory.
He puts this impious doctrine into the mouth of Holy Willie. More than half a century after the time of Burns, preachers in the presence of mothers of their dead babies taught that the babes could not go to heaven because they were too young to be ‘believers in Christ;’ and being unable to account for their statements logically, would say, ‘God did these things for His own glory.’ Burns attacked such horrible teaching, but in doing so he was not attacking religion.
Burns did not believe in the use of the fear of hell as a means of promoting true religion. There is no soul-kindling power in fear. Fear is one of the most powerful agencies of evil in preventing the conscious development of the soul, and of the faith that each soul should have in God as the source of power, in Christ as the revealer of individual power, and in himself as God’s partner. Fear is a negative agency that appeals to the weaker side of character. Humanity will not be able to make the rapid progress towards the Divine that it should make until fear ceases to be a motive in the minds of men, women, and children. In his great ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’ Burns says:
The fear o’ hell’s a hangman’s whip
To haud the wretch in order. keep
Burns proved himself to be a philosopher when he attacked the common plan of using fear o’ hell to make men religious. This was not attacking religion.
The Rev. L. MacLean Watt says: ‘While the professional Christians of Scotland were fighting about Hell, the humble hearts by the lowly firesides, with the open book before them, were enriched by the knowledge of heaven; and while the hypocrites in holy places were scourging those who were in their power with the thorns of Christ, there were cotters in their kitchens that had found the healing and the balm of the warm blood of a Redeemer who died on Calvary for a wider world than theologians seemed to know.’
Speaking further of the theologians of the time of Burns the Rev. Mr Watt says: ‘Their idea of God was shaped in fashion like themselves—merciless, remorseless, hating, and hateful; His only passion seeming to their narrow souls to be damnation and torture of the wretched, lost, and wandering. Their preachers loved to picture the souls of the condemned swathed in batches lying in eternal anguish of a most real blazing hell as punishment for some small offence, or as having been outcast from grace through the wanton exercise of divine prerogatives. To commend such a God for worship were like praising and complimenting the cruel child who, for sport, spent a whole day plucking the limbs and wings from the palpitating body of some poor, helpless insect. It was a false and blasphemous insult to the human intelligence.’
Burns had the good fortune to be a cotter, trained by a father who was a remarkably able man, a great teacher, and a reverently religious man of very advanced ideals; and it took a century or more of theological evolution to bring the religious teaching of the world up to the standards of belief of the Ayrshire cotter.
He attacked the doctrine of Faith without Works. In a letter to Gavin Hamilton, one of the leading men of the town of Mauchline, a warm, personal friend of the poet, and an advanced thinker among ‘New Licht’ laymen, he wrote in a humorous but really profound way: ‘I understand you are in the habit of intimacy with that Boanerges of Gospel powers, Father Auld. Be earnest with him that he will wrestle in prayer for you that you may see the vanity of vanities in trusting to, even practising, the carnal moral works of charity, humanity, and generosity; things which you practised so flagrantly that it was evident you delighted in them, neglecting, or perhaps profanely despising, the wholesome doctrine of faith without works, the only hope of salvation.’
Burns did not say a word against faith in Christ, or love for Christ, or reverence for the teaching of Christ. So true a Christian as Dean Stanley said Burns was a ‘wise religious teacher.’ Burns deplored the fact that the love of Christ—the highest revelation of love ever given to the world—should be limited to saving the individual believer from eternal punishment. That was degrading the highest love into selfishness. Burns pleaded for loving service for humanity, and for Christ’s highest revelation, brotherhood, as evidence of vital Christian-hood; not merely ‘sound believing.’ This was not attacking religion. He attacked the men who attacked other men, like Gavin Hamilton among laymen, and Rev. Dr M’Gill of Ayr among ministers, because they had advanced ideas regarding religion.
He attacked the gloom and awful Sunday solemnity of those who professed to be religious. The world owes him a debt of gratitude for helping to remove the shadows of religious gloom from human lives. In his poem ‘A Dedication,’ addressed to Gavin Hamilton, he advises him ironically, in order that he may be acceptable to Daddy Auld and others of the ‘Auld Licht’ creed, to
Learn three-mile pray’rs an’ half-mile graces,
Wi’ weel-spread looves, an’ lang, wry faces; palms
Grunt up a solemn, lengthened groan,
And damn a’ parties [religious] but your own;
I’ll warrant then you’re nae deceiver,
A steady, sturdy, staunch believer.
If true religion means anything vitally hopeful to a man, it should mean what Burns said it meant to him in a letter to Mrs Dunlop: ‘My dearest enjoyment.’
In his wise poem, ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ he says:
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature.
He attacked the ‘unco guid,’ who delighted to tell how good they were themselves, and how many were the weaknesses and evil-doings of their neighbours. He had no more respect for the self-righteous than Christ had. The fact that he attacked and exposed them, and spoke kindly and reasonably to them, in his great ‘Address to the Unco Guid,’ is an evidence that in this respect at any rate he was a true Christian. One of the most comprehensively Christian doctrines ever written is the verse:
Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each heart—its various tone,
Each spring—its various bias.
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.
There is sound philosophy in the first verse of the poem addressed to the unco guid:
The rigid righteous is a fool,
The rigid wise another.
He often advised the ‘douce folks’ to be considerate of those who had greater temptations than they knew; and advised them to try to help them to overcome their temptations, and with Christian comradeship win their admiration and sympathetic co-operation in some department of achieving good.
In the time of Burns nothing would have surprised a wayward man or woman more than to have received genuine sympathy and respectful comradeship from members of the Church, the institution that claimed to represent Christ, who told the story of the one stray lamb, and the story of the prodigal son; the Great Teacher who said, ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’
Burns attacked superstition, hypocrisy, bigotry, predestination (taught in its most repellent form in the time of Burns), the equally repellent doctrine that ‘God sends men to hell for His own glory;’ fear of hell as a basis of religious life; faith without works; religious gloom; and the spirit of the unco guid. He helped to free religion from these evils more than any other man of his time did; but that was just the opposite to attacking religion.
In the ‘Holy Fair’ and ‘The Twa Herds’ he criticised with biting sarcasm certain things connected with religion in his time, from which it is now happily free. But he did not attack religion. The Rev. L. MacLean Watt, when summing up the great work Burns did for true religion, especially in ‘The Holy Fair,’ ‘The Twa Herds,’ and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer,’ says: ‘It was in consequence of this ecclesiastical contact that he was, ere long, involved in a bitter and incessant warfare with the mediæval shadows of ultra-Calvinism, which laid upon the people the bondage of a rigid predestinarianism, the terrible result of which in parochial religion was, that it became a commonplace in the matter of conduct that it did not matter what you did so long as you believed certain hard and fast tenets dealing with the purpose of God and the future of the human soul. This could not but inevitably lead to the observation of grave discrepancies between creed and conduct; and the setting up of the greatest hypocrisies, veiled in the cloak of religiousness, that yet, with searching eye of judgment, sat testing the conduct of better men. Burns was one of the better men.’
His own attitude towards true religion is shown in his ‘Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math,’ a progressive Presbyterian minister in Tarbolton. In it he says:
All hail, Religion! maid divine!
Pardon a muse sae mean as mine,
Who in her rough, imperfect line
Thus daurs to name thee;
To stigmatise false friends of thine
Can ne’er defame thee.
He stigmatised false friends of religion, but not religion itself.
There are some who yet say ‘Burns could not have been a religious man, because he was a sceptic.’ Burns was an independent thinker. His mind did not accept dogmas or creeds without investigation. In his father’s fine school he was not trained to think he was thinking, when he was merely allowing the ideas of others to run through his head on the path of memory. Burns was not trained to believe that he believed, but to think till he believed; and to accept in the realm beyond his power to reason great fundamental principles that supplied the conscious needs of his own heart, as those principles are revealed in the Bible.
In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: ‘I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not by the halter of an ass.’
To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘My idle reasonings sometimes made me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my own heart always gave the cold philosophisings the lie.’
To Mr Peter Stuart he wrote, referring to the poet Fergusson, 1789: ‘Poor Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is; and if there be a good God presiding over all Nature, which I am sure there is—thou art now enjoying existence in a glorious world, where worth of the heart alone is the distinction of man.’
To Mrs Dunlop, to whom more than to any other person he revealed the depths of his heart, he wrote again, 1789: ‘In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct.’
To Robert Aiken he wrote, 1786: ‘Though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence.’
To Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he wrote, 1787: ‘Despising old women’s stories, I ventured into the daring path Spinoza trod, but my experience with the weakness, not the strength, of human power made me glad to grasp revealed religion.’
To Clarinda he wrote, 1788: ‘The Supreme Being has put the immediate administration of all this for wise and good ends known to Himself into the hands of Jesus Christ, a great personage whose relation to Him we cannot comprehend, but whose relation to us is that of a Guide and Saviour.’
In his epistle to his young friend Andrew Aiken, he sums up in two lines his attitude to scepticism:
An atheist’s laugh’s a poor exchange
For Deity offended.
The men who believe most profoundly are those who honestly doubted in early life, but who naturally loved truth, and sought it with hopeful minds till they found it. Burns was not a sceptic. He was a reverently religious man. No man could have written ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ who was not a reverently religious man. His father, from the earliest years, when his children were old enough to understand them, began to teach them fundamental religious principles. They took root deeply in Robert’s mind. William Burns preferred not to use the ‘Shorter Catechism,’ so he wrote a special catechism for his own family. It is a remarkable production for a man in his position in life. It deals with vitally fundamental principles, and shows a clear understanding of the Bible.
Burns wrote several short religious poems in his early young manhood, probably his twenty-second and twenty-third years, showing that his mind was deeply impressed by the majesty, justice, and love of God. Two of these poems are paraphrases of the Psalms.
The fact that religion was one of the most important elements of his thought and life is amply proved by the five letters he wrote to Alison Begbie in his twenty-first and twenty-second years—even before he wrote his early religious poems. Love-letters though they were, they related nearly as much to religion as to love. Some people have tried to say irreverently smart things about the absurdity of writing about religion in letters to his loved one. Both the religion and the love of his letters to the first woman he ever asked to marry him are too sacred to provoke ridicule in the minds of men with proper reverence for either religion or love. No one can carefully read these five letters without having a deeper respect for Burns, the young gentleman who loved so deeply that he regarded love worthy to be placed in association with religion. Religion was the subject that had been given first place in his life and thought by the teaching and the life of his father, who had meant infinitely more to him than most fathers ever mean to their sons.
In his epistle to Andrew Aiken he recommends, in the last verse but one, two things of vast importance ‘when on life we’re tempest-driv’n’: first,
A conscience but a canker. without
Second,
A correspondence fixed wi’ Heaven
Is sure a noble anchor.
Many people read the last couplet without consciously thinking what a correspondence fixed with Heaven means. Clearly it may have three meanings: prayer, communion in spirit with the Divine, and similarity to or harmony with the divine spirit.
Burns had family worship in his home every day to the end of his life when he was not absent, and though some scoffers may smile, he was earnest and sincere in trying to conduct for himself and for his family a ‘correspondence fixed with heaven’ in a spirit of communion with the Divine Father. He had other altars for communion with God in addition to his home. He composed his poems in the gloaming after his day’s work, in favourite spots in the deep woods, where he was ‘hid with God’ alone. God revealed Himself to Burns in the woods and by the sides of his sacred rivers more fully than in any other places. One of the most sacred shrines in Scotland is the great root under one of the mighty beeches of the fine park on Ballochmyle estate, on which Burns sat so often to compose his poems in the long Scottish twilights, and later on in the moonlight, when he lived on Mossgiel farm. Then next night, at his desk over the stable at Mossgiel, he would rewrite them and improve their form.
No man but a religious man would have written, in his ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ as Burns did to Andrew Aiken:
The great Creator to revere
Must sure become the creature.
When in Irvine, in his twenty-third year, he wrote a letter to his father. As usual, he wrote not of trivial matters, but of the great realities of time and eternity. Among other serious things he wrote: ‘My principal, and, indeed, my only pleasurable, employment is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way.’ In the same letter he wrote:
The soul, uneasy and confined, at home
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.[3]
Burns follows this quotation by saying to his father: ‘It is for this reason that I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the 7th Chapter of Revelation than with any ten times as many verses in the whole Bible, and would not exchange the noble enthusiasm with which they inspire me for all that the world has to offer.’
His imagination enabled him to see clearly the glories of joy, and service, and association, and reward, in the heavenly paradise, as revealed in those triumphant verses.
To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependence, but my dearest enjoyment.... An irreligious poet would be a monster.’
In his ‘Grace before Eating’ he reveals his gratitude and conscious dependence on God:
O Thou, who kindly dost provide
For every creature’s want!
We bless Thee, God of Nature wide,
For all Thy goodness lent.
In ‘Winter: a Dirge’ he says, in reverent submission to God’s will:
Thou Power supreme, whose mighty scheme
Those woes of mine fulfil,
Here firm I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy Will.
In a poem to Clarinda he wrote, recognising the blessing of Gods universal presence, not in awe so much as in joy:
God is ever present, ever felt,
In the void waste, as in the city full;
And where He vital breathes, there must be joy!
In the ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ he teaches absolute faith in God, and indicates man’s true relationship to the Divine Father:
Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,
Implore His counsel and assisting might:
They never sought in vain, that sought the Lord aright.
Writing in condemnation of a miserably selfish miser, he said:
See these hands, ne’er stretched to save,
Hands that took, but never gave;
Keeper of Mammon’s iron chest,
Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest;
She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest.
And are they of no more avail,
Ten thousand glittering pounds a year?
In other worlds can Mammon fail,
Omnipotent as he is here?
O, bitter mockery of the pompous bier,
While down the wretched Vital Part is driven!
The cave-lodged beggar, with a conscience clear,
Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to heaven.
The philosophy of his mind, and the affectionate sympathy of his heart made Burns believe that unselfish service for our fellow-men should be one of the manifestations of true religion.
In the fine poem he wrote to Mrs Dunlop on New Year’s Day, 1790, he says:
A few days may, a few years must,
Repose us in the silent dust.
Then is it wise to damp our bliss?
Yes—all such reasonings are amiss!
The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies;
That on this frail, uncertain state
Hang matters of eternal weight;
That future life in worlds unknown
Must take its hue from this alone;
Whether as heavenly glory bright,
Or dark as Misery’s woeful night.
Let us the important Now employ,
And live as those who never die.
Since, then, my honoured first of friends,
On this poor living all depends.
Any honest man who reads those lines must admit that Burns was a man of deep religious thought and feeling.
Mrs Dunlop, to whom he wrote so many letters, was one of the leading women of Scotland in her time. She was a woman of great wisdom and deep religious character. Like the other great people who knew Burns, she was his friend. Many of his clearest expressions of his religious opinions are contained in his letters to her. In a letter to her on New Year’s morning, 1789, he said: ‘I have some favourite flowers in Spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birk [birch], and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in the Summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of grey-plover in an Autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery that, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to these proofs of those awful and important realities—a God that made all things—man’s immaterial and immortal nature—and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave—these proofs that we deduct by dint of our own powers of observation. However respectable Individuals in all ages have been, I have ever looked on Mankind in the lump to be nothing better than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking Mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me. Still, I am a very sincere believer in the Bible.’
In September 1789 he wrote to Mrs Dunlop: ‘Religion, my dear friend, is true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least four thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it.’
To Mrs Dunlop, in 1792, he wrote: ‘I am so convinced that an unshaken faith in the doctrines of religion is not only necessary by making us better men, but also by making us happier men, that I shall take every care that your little god-son [his son], and every creature that shall call me father, shall be taught them.’
One of his most beautiful religious letters was written to Alexander Cunningham, of Edinburgh, in 1794: ‘Still there are two pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with and link us to, those awful, obscure realities—an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field; the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.
‘I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most as an uncertain obscurity, which mankind can never know anything of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical ear. I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others, were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of view, and for this reason, that I will deeply imbue the mind of every child of mine with religion. If my son should happen to be a man of feeling, sentiment, and taste, I shall thus add largely to his enjoyments. Let me flatter myself that this sweet little fellow, who is just now running about my desk, will be a man of a melting, ardent, glowing heart; and an imagination, delighted with the painter and rapt with the poet. Let me figure him wandering out in a sweet evening, to inhale the balmy gales, and enjoy the glowing luxuriance of the spring; himself the while in the blooming youth of life. He looks abroad on all Nature, and thro’ Nature up to Nature’s God; his soul, by swift delighting degrees, is rapt above this sublunary sphere, until he can be silent no longer, and bursts out into the glorious enthusiasm of Thomson:
‘“These, as they change, Almighty Father—these
Are but the varied God; the rolling year
Is full of thee.”
‘and so on, in all the spirit and ardour of that charming hymn.
‘These are no ideal pleasures; they are real delights; and I ask what of the delights among the sons of men are superior, not to say equal, to them? And they have this precious, vast addition, that conscious Virtue stamps them for her own, and lays hold on them to bring herself into the presence of a witnessing, judging, and approving God.’
In 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: ‘My definition of worth is short: truth and humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the presence of that Being, my Creator and Preserver, and who, I have every reason to believe, will be my judge.’
Again to Clarinda he wrote in 1788: ‘He who is our Author and Preserver, and will one day be our Judge, must be—not for His sake in the way of duty, but from the natural impulse of our hearts—the object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration. He is almighty and all-bounteous; we are weak and dependent; hence prayer and every other sort of devotion. “He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to everlasting life;” consequently it must be in every one’s power to embrace His offer of everlasting life; otherwise He could not in justice condemn those who did not.’
Again in 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: ‘In proportion as we are wrung with grief, or distracted with anxiety, the ideas of a Compassionate Deity, an Almighty Protector, are doubly dear.’
To Mrs Dunlop, in 1795, a year and a half before he died, he wrote: ‘I have nothing to say to any one as to which sect he belongs to, or what creed he believes; but I look on the man who is firmly persuaded of Infinite Wisdom and Goodness superintending and directing every circumstance that can happen in his lot—I felicitate such a man as having a solid foundation for his mental enjoyment; a firm prop and stay in the hour of difficulty, trouble, and distress; and a never-failing anchor of hope when he looks beyond the grave.’
This quotation emphasises his lifelong faith in God, and his belief in his own immortality. It also shows his perfect freedom from bigotry, and the broadness of his creed.
In his first ‘Commonplace Book’ he wrote: ‘The grand end of Human being is to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life, with every enjoyment that renders life delightful; and to maintain an integritive conduct towards our fellow-creatures; that by so forming Piety and Virtue into habit, we may be fit members for that society of the Pious, and the Good, which reason and revelation teach us to expect beyond the grave.’
There are no truly good men who will yield to the temptation to speak sneeringly of any man who fails in his life to reach his highest ideals. The little-minded men who may sneer at Burns, when they read this quotation written in his youth, should read his ‘Address to the Unco Guid’ over and over, till they get a glimmering comprehension of its meaning. Whatever the puny minds may be focussed on in the life of Burns, they should be ‘mute at the balance.’ They should remember that Burns did more than any man of his time for true religion, and that to the end of his life his mind and heart overflowed with the same faith and gratitude to God that he almost continuously expressed throughout his life.
A final quotation from the letters of Burns about religion may fittingly be taken from a letter to Robert Aiken, written in 1786: ‘O thou unknown Power! Thou Almighty God who hast lighted up Reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me.’
Burns was a reverently religious man. Dean Stanley said: ‘Burns was a wise religious teacher.’ Principal Rainy objected to Dean Stanley’s view because ‘Burns had never become a member of a church on profession of Faith in Christ.’ Professor Rainy either did not remember, or had never realised, that Burns had done more to reveal Christ’s highest teachings—the value of the individual soul, and brotherhood—than any other man in the church, or out of it, in Scotland in his time; and also did more to make religion free from false theology and dwarfing practices, than any other man of his time, or of any other time in Scotland.
Rev. L. MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, in his most admirable book on Burns, answers Principal Rainy’s objections with supreme ability, as the following quotations amply prove: ‘Because a man does not categorically declare his belief in Christ, as that belief is formulated in existing dogmatic statements of theological authority, it does not mean that he abhors that belief; nor even though he withhold himself from explicitly uttering that confession of the Christian faith, does it preclude him from being a religious teacher. A man may have an enormous influence as a religious teacher, and yet never have made a formal statement of Christianity, nor signed a Christian creed.’—‘The measure of a man’s faithfulness to the better side of his nature is not to be gauged by the depth of his fall, but the height to which he rises.... Burns was, unfortunately, confronted by a narrow and self-righteous set, who were enslaved to doctrine and dogma, rather than to the practice of the Christian life with charity and humanity of spirit, part and parcel of a system of petty tyrannies and mean oppressions, the exercise of which made for exile from the fold, because of the spiritual conceit and sectarian humbug which created such characters as “Holy Willie,” and the “Unco Guid,” with the superior airs of religious security from which they looked down on all besides.’
We should test neither the terrible theologians of his time—those men who attacked Burns and called him irreligious, because he had a clear vision of a higher, holier religion than the one they preached—nor Burns himself by the conditions of our own time. It is unjust both to Burns and to his enemies to do so.
A comparison of the religious principles of the best Christians in the world nearly a century and a half after his time will show, however, that the creed of the present is more—much more—like the creed of Burns than the creed of the dreadful theologians of his time. The creed of the religious leaders a century hence will be still more like the creed of Robert Burns than is the creed of to-day.
The following creed is taken from the letters of Burns, expressed in his own language, except the last article, which is found in longer form in many of his letters, and more nearly in ‘The Hermit,’ in which he says:
Let me, O Lord! from life retire,
Unknown each guilty, worldly fire,
Remorse’s throb, or loose desire;
And when I die
Let me in this belief expire—
To God I fly.
THE CREED OF ROBERT BURNS.
1. Religion should be a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich.
2. There is a great and incomprehensible Being to whom I owe my existence.
3. The Creator perfectly understands the being He has made.
4. There is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue.
5. There must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.
6. From the sublimity, the excellence, and the purity of His doctrines and precepts, I believe Jesus Christ came from God.
7. Whatever is done to mitigate the woes, or increase the happiness of humanity, is goodness.
8. Whatever injures society or any member of it is iniquity.
9. I believe in the immaterial and immortal nature of man.
10. I believe in eternal life with God.
Carlyle expressed regret that ‘Burns became involved in the religious quarrels of his district.’ This statement proves that Carlyle failed fully to comprehend the religious character of Burns. His chivalrous nature was partly responsible for his entering the battle waged by the ‘Auld Lichts’ against his dear friend the Rev. Dr M’Gill of Ayr and Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline; but his chief reason was his innate determination to free religion from the evils taught and practised in the name of religion in his time. He had the soul of a reformer, and the two leading elements in his soul were Religion and Liberty for the individual. It would have robbed the world of one of the greatest steps in human progress towards the Divine made in the eighteenth century, if Burns had failed to be true to the greatest things in his mind and heart.
Carlyle had clearly not studied the religious elements in either the poems or the letters of Burns, or he could not have written his comparison between Burns and Locke, Milton, and Cervantes, who did in poverty and unusual difficulties grand work. He asks: ‘What, then, had these men which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true religious principle of morals, and a single, not a double, aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of Heavenly Wisdom in one form or the other form ever hovered before them.
It passes understanding to comprehend how Carlyle could regard Burns as a ‘selfish’ man, or a man with ‘a double aim’—that is, two conflicting and opposing aims that he wasted his power in trying to harmonise.
Burns had three great aims: Purer Religion, a just Democracy, and closer Brotherhood; but these aims are in perfect harmony.
Carlyle ends the contrast between Burns and his model trio—Locke, Milton, and Cervantes—by saying of Burns: ‘He has no religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light forms of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men.’
‘The heart not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true poet and singer, worthy of the old religions heroic, had been given him, and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride.’
In a just comparison between Burns and the three named by Carlyle, Burns will need no apologists. Burns, directly in opposition to the statement of Carlyle, was more vitally religious and less selfish than any of them. When twenty-one years of age he said, in one of his beautiful love-letters to Alison Begbie: ‘I grasp every creature in the arms of universal benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.’ This alone proves that Burns was one of the least selfish men who ever lived.
As an heroic teacher of vital religion Burns was infinitely greater than any other man of his time, and has been much more influential since his time in promoting Christ’s ideals than the men named by Carlyle. He was a fearless hero, and so meets the requirements specified by Carlyle, because, when he recognised the evils connected with religion in his time, when true religion was, to use Carlyle’s words, ‘becoming obsolete,’ he valiantly attacked them, hoping to enable his fellow-men to see the vision of true religion which his father had given him by his life and teaching.
There was absolutely no justification for calling Burns a mere verse-monger. To write such a wild nightmare dream about Scotland’s greatest and most self-less poet was unworthy of one of Scotland’s leading prose-writers.
It seems almost ludicrous to take notice of the assertion that Burns had not a high ideal of patriotism, as compared with the three ideal men of Carlyle—Burns, whose love for Scotland was a sacred feeling, a holy fire that never ceased to burn. This criticism needs no answer now.