Since the time of Burns men and women, both in the churches and out of them, have learned to set more store on the importance of living truly on the earth, and have ceased to a large extent to think only of a life to come after death. Men and women are now trying in increasing numbers to make it more heavenly here.
Burns taught a sound philosophy of contentment as a basis for happiness.
He wrote to Mr Ainslie in 1789: ‘You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business [that of a gauger], but I am tired with and disgusted at the language of complaint at the evils of life. Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills; capricious, foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills, as if they were the peculiar property of his own particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin, many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead; and is almost without exception a constant source of disappointment and misery. So far from being dissatisfied with my present lot, I earnestly pray the Great Disposer of events that it may never be worse, and I think I can lay my hand on my heart and say “I shall be content.”’
Good, sound philosophy of contentment! Not the contentment that does not try to improve life’s conditions, but the wise contentment that recognises the best in present conditions, instead of foolishly resenting what it cannot change.
Burns taught the philosophy of good citizenship.
In 1789 he wrote to Mr Ainslie: ‘If the relations we stand in to King, country, kindred, and friends be anything but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity, humanity, and justice be aught but empty sounds; then the man who may be said to live only for others, for the beloved, honourable female whose tender, faithful embrace endears life, and for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God, the subjects of his King, and the support, nay the very vital existence, of his country in the ensuing age, is the type of truest manhood.’
This quotation from a letter written to a warm, personal friend from whom he was not seeking any favours gives an insight into a rational mind loyal to God, loyal to his king, loyal to his country, and lovingly loyal to his wife and family.
In a letter to the Right Rev. Dr Geddes, a Roman Catholic Bishop resident in Edinburgh, a very kind friend to Burns, he wrote, 1789: ‘I am conscious that wherever I am, you do me the honour to interest yourself in my welfare. It gives me pleasure to inform you that I am here at last [at Ellisland], stationary in the serious business of life, and have now not only the retired leisure, but the hearty inclination to attend to those great and important questions: What I am? Where I am? For what I am destined? Thus with a rational aim and method in life, you may easily guess, my reverend and much honoured friend, that my characteristical trade is not forgotten; I am, if possible, more than ever an enthusiast to the Muses. I am determined to study Man and Nature, and in that view, incessantly to try if the ripening and corrections of years can enable me to produce something worth preserving.’
Bishop Gillis, a Roman Catholic Bishop who lived more than sixty years after the death of Burns, said, in reference to the letter from which this quotation was made: ‘If any man, after perusing this letter, will still say that the mind of Burns was beyond the reach of religious influence, or, in other words, that he was a scoffer at revelation, that man need not be reasoned with, as his own mind must be hopelessly beyond the reach of argument.’
In a letter to his friend Cunningham he wrote, 1789: ‘What strange beings we are! Since we have a portion of conscious existence equally capable of enjoying pleasure, happiness, and rapture, or of suffering pain, wretchedness, and misery, it is surely worthy of inquiry whether there be not such a thing as a science of life; whether method, economy, and fertility of expedients be not applicable to enjoyment, and whether there be not a want of dexterity in pleasure which renders our little scantling of happiness still less; and a profuseness and intoxication in bliss which leads to satiety, disgust, and self-abhorrence.