All hail, Religion! maid divine!
Pardon a muse sae mean as mine,
Who in her rough, imperfect line
Thus daurs to name thee;
To stigmatise false friends of thine
Can ne’er defame thee.
He stigmatised false friends of religion, but not religion itself.
There are some who yet say ‘Burns could not have been a religious man, because he was a sceptic.’ Burns was an independent thinker. His mind did not accept dogmas or creeds without investigation. In his father’s fine school he was not trained to think he was thinking, when he was merely allowing the ideas of others to run through his head on the path of memory. Burns was not trained to believe that he believed, but to think till he believed; and to accept in the realm beyond his power to reason great fundamental principles that supplied the conscious needs of his own heart, as those principles are revealed in the Bible.
In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: ‘I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not by the halter of an ass.’
To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘My idle reasonings sometimes made me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my own heart always gave the cold philosophisings the lie.’
To Mr Peter Stuart he wrote, referring to the poet Fergusson, 1789: ‘Poor Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is; and if there be a good God presiding over all Nature, which I am sure there is—thou art now enjoying existence in a glorious world, where worth of the heart alone is the distinction of man.’
To Mrs Dunlop, to whom more than to any other person he revealed the depths of his heart, he wrote again, 1789: ‘In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct.’
To Robert Aiken he wrote, 1786: ‘Though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence.’
To Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he wrote, 1787: ‘Despising old women’s stories, I ventured into the daring path Spinoza trod, but my experience with the weakness, not the strength, of human power made me glad to grasp revealed religion.’
To Clarinda he wrote, 1788: ‘The Supreme Being has put the immediate administration of all this for wise and good ends known to Himself into the hands of Jesus Christ, a great personage whose relation to Him we cannot comprehend, but whose relation to us is that of a Guide and Saviour.’