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