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: