Well was it the satires were written by so powerful a satirist, that the Church purged itself of the evil thing and cleansed its ways. This, however, is an episode of such importance in the life of Burns, and in the religious history of Scotland, as to require to be taken up carefully and considered by itself.
CHAPTER III
THE SERIES OF SATIRES
Before we can clearly see and understand Burns's attitude to the Church, we must have studied the nature of the man himself, and we must know something also of his religious training. It will not be enough to select his series of satires, and, from a study of them alone, try to make out the character of the man. His previous life must be known; the natural bent of his mind apprehended, and once that is grasped, these satires will appeal to the heart and understanding of the reader with a sense of naturalness and expectedness. They are as inevitable as his love lyrics, and are read with the conviction that his merciless exposure of profanity masquerading in the habiliments of religion, was part of the life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been born, it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys and sorrows of his fellow men and women, but to purge their lives of grossness, and their religion of the filth of hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he himself went 'a kennin wrang.' What argument is there? We do not deny the divine mission of Samson because of Delilah. Surely that giant's life was a wasted one, yet in his very death he was true to his mission, and fulfilled the purpose of his birth. In other lands and in other times the satirist is recognised and his work appraised; the abuses he scourged, the pretensions he ridiculed, are seen in all their hideousness; but when a great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe the ulcers of pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things, touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. Why should the cloth—as it is so ingenuously called—be touched with delicate hands, unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time.
Let us have done with all this timidity and coward tenderness. If the Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe of the cloth, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country, rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the Church's martyrs that have handed down through the ages the light of the world.
The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns attacked were evils insidious and poisonous, eating to the very heart of the religious life of the country, and they required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful that the remedy was applied in time; and, looking to the righteousness he wrought, let us bless the name of Burns.
Burns's father, stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that day has been here softened down into something not very far from Arminianism. He had had a hard experience in the world himself, and that may have drawn him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into closer communion with his God. He had learned that religion is a thing of the spirit, and not a matter of creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns's own religion it would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The religion of a man is not to be paraded before the public like the manifesto of a party politician. After all, is there a single man who can sincerely, without equivocation or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist, Arminian, Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his mind must be a marvel of mathematical nicety and nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is that he was naturally and sincerely religious; that he worshipped an all-loving Father, and believed in an ever-present God; that his charity was boundless; that he loved what was good and true, and hated with an indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false. He loved greatly his fellow-creatures, man and beast and flower; he could even find something to pity in the fate of the devil himself. That he was not orthodox, in the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in his day, we are well enough aware, else had he not been the poet we love and cherish.
In his early days at Mount Oliphant there is a hint of these later satires. 'Polemical divinity about this time was,' he says, 'putting the country half-mad, and I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between sermons, in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I raised a hue and cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.' And heresy is a terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland. In those days it was Anathema-maranatha; even now it is still the war-slogan of the Assemblies.
The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting the country half-mad was the wordy war that was being carried on at that time between the Auld Lights and the New Lights. These New Lights, as they were called, were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of revolution was abroad; in France it became acutely political; in Scotland there was a desire for greater religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox, was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy had been lifted certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism which had taken its place was quite as heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing, it had been endured willingly. But a generation was springing up—stiff-necked they might have been called, in that they fretted under the yoke of their fathers—that sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their pastors and the fossilised formalism of their creed. To the people in their bondage a prophet was born, and that prophet was Robert Burns.
It was natural that a man of Burns's temperament and clearness of perception should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and common sense in matters of religion. Whenever we neglect or despise those sacred monitors, the whimsical notions of a perturbed brain are taken for the immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest fanaticism and the most inconsistent absurdities will meet with abettors and converts. Nay, I have often thought that the more out of the way and ridiculous their fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the name of religion, the unhappy, mistaken votaries are the more firmly glued to them.'