by Robert Burns
The progress of religious reformers has always been a thorny one. The Master, Christ Himself, was crucified by the ‘Auld Lichts’ of His time, and they stoned Stephen to death. So, through the centuries unprogressive theologians have persecuted and often murdered the religious reformers, who saw the evils in theology, and wished to remove them from the creeds that blighted men’s souls. They burned Latimer in England; and Luther in Germany was saved by the action of his friends by shutting him in Wartburg Castle for protection. Religious reformers in the time of Burns were not burned or stoned to death, but they were persecuted and prosecuted before the Church Courts by men who did not approve of their higher visions of truth. Burns himself was regarded as unorthodox, but his creed is much more in harmony with the religious thought of to-day than it was with the creed of the ‘Auld Licht’ preachers. One of the marvels of human development through the ages has been that the bigoted theologians of each succeeding century resented the attempts of men with clearer vision to reform their creeds.
Men who truly believe in God cannot believe that any creed made by men can be infallible; they should know that from generation to generation humanity consciously grows towards the Divine, and that as they climb they see in the clearer spiritual air new visions of higher meaning in regard to life and to vital religion, revealing to each man new conceptions of his duty to God and to his fellow-men.
Lovers of Burns reverence his memory because he was so great and so wise a reformer, and did so much to make men truly free, and to make religion a more vitally uplifting agency in the hearts of men.
CHAPTER IV. Burns was a Religious Man.
‘Burns a religious man!’ scoffers exclaim. ‘He was a drunkard.’ Burns was a moderate drinker compared with most of the ministers of his time. If drinking whisky was a disqualification for religious character in the time of Burns, a large proportion of the ministers of his time were disqualified. Burns should not, in all fairness, be judged by the standards of our time. More than fifty years after Burns died it was customary for even Methodist ministers in Canada, when visiting the members of their churches, to accept a little whisky punch as an evidence of good fellowship and comradeship. This custom persisted in Scotland and England for more than a century after Burns died, and in many places it exists still. In a letter to Mr William Cruickshank in 1788 he said: ‘I have fought my way severely through the savage hospitality of this country — the object of all hosts being to send every guest to bed drunk if they can.’
Burns was not speaking of hotel-keepers, but of homes of people of high respectability. He wrote in 1793: ‘Taverns I have totally abandoned, but it is the private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking gentlemen of the country that do me the mischief.’
He did occasionally go to the Globe Tavern in Dumfries after 1793, when the guest of visitors who came to Dumfries solely for the purpose of meeting him and having the honour of entertaining him.
In his short life of Burns, Alexander Smith says: ‘If he drank hard, it was in an age when hard drinking was fashionable. If he sinned in this respect, he sinned in company with English Prime Ministers, Scotch Lords of Session, grave dignitaries of the Church in both countries, and thousands of ordinary blockheads who went to their graves in the odour of sanctity, and whose epitaphs are a catalogue of all the virtues.’
Burns spoke with all sincerity, in a letter to his friend Samuel Clark of Dumfries, when he wrote: ‘Some of our folks about the Excise office, Edinburgh, had, and perhaps still have, conceived a prejudice against me as being a drunken, dissipated character. I might be all this, you know, and yet be an honest fellow; but you know that I am an honest fellow, and am nothing of this.’ His superiors in the Excise department gave him a high record for accuracy and honesty in his work.
Other objectors say: ‘He could not be religious, because he attacked religion.’ This statement is not correct. He attacked the evils that in his time robbed religion of its vital power, but never religion. Emerson says: ‘Not Luther, not Latimer, struck stronger blows against false theology than did the poet Burns.’
To Clarinda, Burns wrote: ‘I hate the superstition of a fanatic, but I love the religion of a man.’
In his poem ‘The Tree of Liberty’ he lays the blame of the terrible degradation of the French peasantry on
Superstition’s wicked brood.
In his ‘Epistle to John Goudie’ he speaks of
Poor gapin’, glowrin’ superstition.
He attacked superstition, but not religion.
He attacked hypocrisy, and true men are grateful to him because he did so.
In his ‘Epistle to Rev. John M’Math,’ the ‘New Licht’ minister of Tarbolton, Burns says:
God knows I’m not the thing I should be,
Nor am I ev’n the thing I could be;
But twenty times I rather would be
An atheist clean,
Than under gospel colours hid be
Just for a screen.
He ridiculed hypocrisy, and we are grateful to him for doing so. Nothing more contemptible than a religious hypocrite can be made of a being created in the image of God. Hypocrisy is not religion.
He attacked bigotry, one of the most savage monsters that ever tried to block the way of Christ’s highest teaching, the brotherhood of man. No phenomenal religious absurdity is more incomprehensible than the idea that Christianity can be promoted by the multiplication of religious denominations; especially when, as in the time of Burns, and long after his time, leaders of so-called Christian denominations refused to have fellowship with each other, or to unite on a common platform in working for the promotion of Christian ideals. How trivial the formalisms of theologians seem that kept men apart whom Christ desired to become co-operative and loving brothers, working harmoniously together for the achievement of the great visions he revealed!
He wrote to Clarinda, 1788: ‘I hate the very idea of a controversial divinity; and I firmly believe that every upright, honest man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.’
In his ‘Epistle to John Goudie’ Burns calls bigotry
Sour bigotry on its last legs.
He wrote this in 1785, and much more than a century later bigotry is still on its legs, but it is tottering to its final overthrow. Burns attacked bigotry, but not religion.
He attacked the doctrine of predestination, as taught in his time, a most soul-dwarfing doctrine, calculated to rob humanity of motives to stimulate it to greater and nobler efforts to achieve for God. He makes Holy Willie say he deserved damnation five thousand years before he was born. Few people now regard predestination as an element in vital religion.
He attacked one of the most horribly blasphemous doctrines ever preached, but preached in the time of Burns, and long after:
That God sends ane to heaven and ten to hell
For His ain glory.
He puts this impious doctrine into the mouth of Holy Willie. More than half a century after the time of Burns, preachers in the presence of mothers of their dead babies taught that the babes could not go to heaven because they were too young to be ‘believers in Christ;’ and being unable to account for their statements logically, would say, ‘God did these things for His own glory.’ Burns attacked such horrible teaching, but in doing so he was not attacking religion.
Burns did not believe in the use of the fear of hell as a means of promoting true religion. There is no soul-kindling power in fear. Fear is one of the most powerful agencies of evil in preventing the conscious development of the soul, and of the faith that each soul should have in God as the source of power, in Christ as the revealer of individual power, and in himself as God’s partner. Fear is a negative agency that appeals to the weaker side of character. Humanity will not be able to make the rapid progress towards the Divine that it should make until fear ceases to be a motive in the minds of men, women, and children. In his great ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’ Burns says:
The fear o’ hell’s a hangman’s whi
p
To haud the wretch in order. keep
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:
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:
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.’
