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: