Taken by themselves, his utterances to Clarinda and Mrs. Dunlop might not be above suspicion. Burns had every motive for wishing favourably to impress both women, and might have feigned an interest which he did not feel, or at least have overstated his belief and understated his doubts. But here, as in his feelings towards his children, what he said when he may have been on dress-parade is confirmed by his letters to his intimates. In 1788 he wrote to Robert Muir, then dying of tuberculosis:
‘... An honest man has nothing to fear.—If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley—be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the apparent destruction of the man—away with old-wife prejudices and tales!... A man, conscious of having acted an honest part among his fellow-creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows their force.’
In the same tone he said six years later to Alexander Cunningham that the two great pillars which bear us up, ‘amid the wreck of misfortune and misery’, are the ‘certain noble, stubborn something ... known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity’ and ‘those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those senses of the mind ... which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities—an all-powerful and equally beneficient God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave.’
The countryman of Francis Hutcheson could scarcely have indicated more clearly his obligations to the Glasgow philosopher. Burns’s ‘senses of the mind’ are merely Hutcheson’s Moral Sense a little expanded. Like Channing and Emerson, having rejected the authority of the church, and with it the supernatural sanctions of Christian doctrine, Burns fell back on the authority of intuition to support concepts which he was unwilling to abandon. The idea of the deity, and His relations with mankind, which is embodied in these passages, he never deviated from; what seemed to many of his readers shocking irreverence was aimed at intolerance and hypocrisy, and not at religion. But he was not able in all moods to convince himself of personal immortality.
At times he tried to argue himself into belief:
‘The most cordial believers in a Future State have ever been the Unfortunate.—This of itself; if God is Good, which is, I think, the most intuitive truth in Nature, ... is a very strong proof of the reality of its existence....’
and he went on to reason that since the ideas of ‘OUGHT, and OUGHT NOT’ are ‘first principles or component parts of the Human Mind’ and are synonymous in our thinking with virtue and vice, the soul must be immortal because, ‘except our Existence here, have a reference to an Existence hereafter, Virtue & Vice are words without meaning.’ Thus he argued to Mrs. Dunlop, who had just told him that her daughter, Mrs. Henri, was widowed after a few months of marriage. But not long before he had said to Cunningham,
‘All my fears & cares are of this world: if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it.—I hate a man that wishes to be a Deist, but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced Enquirer must in some degree be a Sceptic.—It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the Immortality of Man; but, that like Electricity, Phlogiston, &c. the subject is so involved in darkness that we want Data to go upon.—One thing frightens me much: that we are to live forever, seems too good news to be true....’
An emotional man deprived of any authority except emotion on which he could rely, Burns’s religious views are of a piece with his politics and his patriotism. To get at the underlying emotions is to explain what appear to be glaring contradictions in thought. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre found Burns’s politics ‘abundantly motley’, for the poet managed to combine strong sympathy for the exiled House of Stuart with liberal if not republican views on contemporary affairs. To Ramsay this seemed like being simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, whereas it was only putting into words the unexpressed philosophy that had swayed the popular mind of Scotland for close on a century. Burns admired Lord Balmerino, noblest of the victims of the ’45; he also admired John Wilkes. Between a devoted Jacobite like Balmerino and a radical Whig like Wilkes, there was only one point in common: both were anti-Hanoverian. That one point reconciles Burns’s divergent opinions. The Stuarts embodied the ideal of Scotland as an independent nation; even though from the accession of James to the death of Anne they had governed Scotland from London they still commanded the loyalty of their old kingdom. But the Georges were, as Burns said, ‘an obscure, beef-witted, insolent race of foreigners whom a mere conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into prominence and power.’ His phrase summarizes in vigorous prose the spirit of the ribald satirical songs by which Scotland had avenged herself for the humiliations following the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Burns was far from maintaining that the Stuarts were perfect, or that the Revolution of 1688 lacked justification; what he did maintain was that the Hanoverian system was not perfect either.
On the Fifth of November, 1788, Burns attended a special service of thanksgiving held at Dunscore Kirk to celebrate the centenary of the Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s remarks about ‘the bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart’ sent the poet home to write an open letter to his friend David Ramsay, editor of the Edinburgh Evening Courant, in which he mingled unveiled satire with a sense of historical perspective hardly to be looked for in an ‘unlettered ploughman’. He went to church, he said, to give thanks for ‘the consequent blessings of the Glorious Revolution. To that auspicious event we owe no less than our liberties religious and civil—to it we are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, the ruling features of whose administration have ever been, mildness to the subject, and tenderness of his rights.’ But, he continues, cannot we give thanks for our present blessings ‘without, at the same time, cursing a few ruined powerless exiles, who only harboured ideas, and made attempts, that most of us would have done, had we been in their situation?’ ‘Were the royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more mildly attentive to the rights of man? Might not the epithets of “bloody and tyrannical” be with at least equal justice, applied to the house of Tudor, of York, or any other of their predecessors?’ In short, the Stuarts were only fighting for prerogatives which former monarchs of England and contemporary monarchs of France enjoyed unchallenged, and the poet disclaims ability to determine whether their overthrow ‘was owing to the wisdom of leading individuals, or to the justling of party.’ And then comes the sting: