In ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ after dilating on the glories of simple, reverent religion, as compared with ‘Religion’s Pride,’
In all the pomp of method and of art,
When men display to congregations wide
Devotion’s every grace except the heart,
he prays for the young people of Scotland—
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content;
And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle.
He understood the value of simplicity in life as well as in religion, and expressed it in admirable form.
‘The Address to the Unco Guid’ has a kindly philosophic sympathy running like a stream of light through it; the profound sympathy of the Master who searched for the one stray lamb, and who suggested that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. The last verse especially contains a sublime human philosophy, that if studied till understood, and then practised, would work a greatly needed change in the attitude of the rest of humanity towards the so-called wayward. It is one of the strange anomalies of life that, generally, professing Christian women have in the past been the last to come with Christian sympathy of an affectionate, and sisterly, and respectful quality to take an erring sister in their arms to try to prove that she still possessed their esteem, and to rekindle faith in her heart.
His poem to Mrs Dunlop on ‘New Year’s Day, 1790;‘ ’A Man’s a Man for a’ That;’ ‘A Winter Night;’ ‘Sketch in Verse;’ and ‘Verses written in Friar’s Carse Hermitage,’ all show him to have been a philosophic student of human nature.
A few quotations from letters to his friends will show his philosophical attitude to general matters, as the quotations from his letters showed the clearness and trueness of his philosophy regarding religion, democracy, and brotherhood.
Burns saw man’s duty to his fellows and to himself in this life.
In a letter to Robert Ainslie, Edinburgh, 1788, he wrote: ‘I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation, if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegrative depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much-talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter of fact. But in all things belonging to, and terminating in, the present scene of existence, man has serious business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance; whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, or at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitudes of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink beneath a galling load of regret and remorse—these are alternatives of the last moment.’