THE REAL ROBERT BURNS

THE REAL ROBERT BURNS

BY
J. L. HUGHES, LL.D.
Author of ‘Dickens as an Educator,’ &c.

LONDON: 38 Soho Square, W.1
W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED
EDINBURGH: 339 High Street
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO: Corner Queen and John Streets

Printed in Great Britain.
W. & R. Chambers, Ltd., London and Edinburgh.

CONTENTS.

FOREWORD.

The writer of the following pages learned years ago to reverence the memories of Burns and Dickens. Frequently hearing one or the other attacked from platform or pulpit, and believing both to be great interpreters of the highest things taught by Christ, as the basis of the development of humanity towards the Divine, he resolved that some day he would try to help the world to understand correctly the work of these two great men. His book, Dickens as an Educator, has helped to give a new conception of Dickens, as an educational pioneer and as a philosopher. The purpose of this book is to show that Burns was well educated, and that both in his poems and in his letters he was an unsurpassed exponent of the highest human ideals yet expressed of religion—democracy based on the value of the individual soul, brotherhood, love, and the philosophy of human life.

The writer believes that gossiping in regard to the weakness of the living is indecent and degrading, but that it is pardonable as compared with the debasing practice of gossiping about the weaknesses of the dead. Those who can wallow in the muck of degraded biographers are only a degree less wicked than the biographers themselves, who sin against the dead, and sin against the living by providing debasing matter for them to read.

The evidence to prove the positions claimed to be true in this book is mainly taken from the poems and letters of Burns himself. Some may doubt the sincerity of Burns. Carlyle had no doubt about his sincerity or his honesty. He says of the popularity of Burns: ‘The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that excellence? To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or in prose, but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognised—his sincerity, his indisputable air of truth.’

Speaking of the moral character of Burns, Carlyle said: ‘We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand.... What he did under such circumstances, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.’

Shakespeare says in Hamlet: ‘Ay, sir, to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’ Carlyle chose Burns as one of ten thousand.

These quotations should help two classes of men: the ‘unco guid,’ who believe evil stories, most of which had no real foundation; and those professed lovers of Burns who love him for his weaknesses. The real Robert Burns was not weak enough to suit either of these two classes. ‘Less guilty than one in ten thousand’ is a high standard.

To do something to help all men and women to a juster understanding of the real Robert Burns is the aim of the writer. Let us learn, and ever remember, that he was a reverent writer about religion, a clear interpreter of Christ’s teaching of democracy and brotherhood, a profound philosopher, and the author of the purest love-songs ever written.

THE REAL ROBERT BURNS.

CHAPTER I.

The True Values of Biography.

A man’s biography should relate the story of his development in power, and his achievements for his fellow-men. Biography can justify itself only in two ways: by revealing the agencies and experiences that formed a man’s character and aided in the growth of his highest powers; and by relating the things he achieved for humanity, and the processes by which he achieved them.

Only the good in the lives of great men should be recorded in biographies. To relate the evil men do, or describe their weaknesses, is not only objectionable, it is in every way execrable. It degrades those who write it and those who read it. Biography should not be mainly a story; it should be a revelation, not of evil, but of good. It should unfold and impress the value of the visions of the great man whose biography is being written, and his success in revealing his high visions to his fellow-men. It should tell the things he achieved or produced to make the world better; the things that aid in the growth of humanity towards the divine. The biographer who tells of evils is, from thoughtlessness or malevolence, a mischievous enemy of mankind.

No man’s memory was ever more unjustly dealt with than the memory of Robert Burns. His first editor published many poems that Burns said on his death-bed should be allowed ‘to sink into oblivion,’ and told all of weakness that he could learn in order that he might be regarded as just. He considered justice to himself of more consequence than justice to Burns, or to humanity. His only claim to be remembered is the fact that he prepared the poems of Burns for publication, and wrote his biography. It is much to be regretted that he had not higher ideals of what a biography should be, not merely for the memory of the man about whom it is written, but for its influence in enlightening and uplifting those who read it. Biographers should reveal not weaknesses, but the things achieved for God and humanity.

Carlyle, writing of the biographers of Burns, says: ‘His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr Currie and Mr Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one important thing: their own and the world’s true relation to the author, and the style in which it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr Currie loved the poet truly, more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronising, apologetic air, as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar and a gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet’s biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr Walker offends more deeply in the same kind, and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his attributes, virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity.’

The biographers of Robert Burns criticised reputed defects of his—defects common among men of all classes and all professions in his time—but failed to give him credit for his revelations of divine wisdom. They bemoaned his lack of religion—though he was a reverently religious man—instead of telling the simple truth that he was the greatest religious reformer of his time in any part of the world. They said he was not a Christian because he did not perform certain ceremonies required by the churches, when freer and less bigoted men would have told the real fact, that he was one of the world’s greatest interpreters of Christ’s highest ideals—democracy and brotherhood. He still holds that high rank. They related idle gossip about his vanity and other trivial stories, instead of being content with proclaiming him the greatest genius of his time in the comprehensiveness of his visions, and in the scope of his powers. Some of them tried to prove that he was not a loyal man; they should have revealed him as the giant leader of men in making them conscious of the value of liberty and of the right of every man to its fullest enjoyment.

The oft-repeated charge of disloyalty was disproved when the charge was made during the life of Burns, but the false accusation has been accepted as a fact by many people to the present time. Fortunately the records of the Dumfries Volunteers have been discovered recently, and Mr William Will has published them in a book entitled Robert Burns as a Volunteer. They prove most conclusively that Burns was a truly loyal man. When the Provost of Dumfries called a meeting of the citizens of Dumfries to consider the need of establishing a company of Volunteers Burns attended the meeting, and was chosen as a member of a small committee to write to the king asking permission to form a company. When permission was granted by the king, Burns joined the company on the night when it was first organised, and sat up most of the night composing ‘The Dumfries Volunteers,’ the most inspiring poem of its kind ever written. It did more to arouse the people of Scotland and England to put down the bolshevism of the time than any other loyal propaganda.

The minutes of the Volunteer Company in Dumfries give a perfect answer to the basest slander ever made against Burns—that he had sunk so low as a hopelessly vile drunkard the respectable people of Dumfries would not associate with him; that he was ostracised by the community at large. Yet this ‘ostracised man’ was chosen by the best citizens of Dumfries as one of the committee to write to King George, and was elected as a member of the committee to manage the company. This slander was so generally accepted in Carlyle’s time that even Carlyle himself wrote that Burns did not die too soon, as he had lost the respect of his fellow-men, and had lost also the power to write. His first statement is proved to have no true foundation by the record of the Dumfries Volunteer Company, and the second by the fact that Burns wrote the greatest poem ever written by any man to interpret Christ’s highest visions, democracy and brotherhood, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That,’ the year before he died, and ‘The Dumfries Volunteers.’ The second year before his death he wrote ‘The Tree of Liberty’ and ‘The Ode to Liberty,’ and the third year before he died he wrote the clarion call to fight in defence of freedom, ‘Scots, wha hae.’ These poems have no equals in any literature of their kind. During the same three years of his life he wrote one hundred and seventeen other fine songs and sent them to Edinburgh for publication, the last one on the ninth day before his death. It should be remembered, too, that Burns had to ride two hundred miles each week in the discharge of his duty to the government; and that after the organisation of the Volunteer Company he had to drill four hours each week, and attend the meetings of the company committee. The minutes of the company show he was never fined for absence.

The last meeting he attended before his fatal illness was called to prepare a letter of gratitude to God for preserving the life of the king when the London bolshevistic mob tried to kill him on his way to the House of Commons. Assisting to prepare this letter to the king was the last public act of Burns.

Had his weaknesses been tenfold what they were, his biographers should have said nothing about them, for in spite of his human weakness he had divine power to reveal to all men Christ’s teachings—democracy and brotherhood, based on the value of the individual soul. He was also the greatest poet of religion, ethics, and love; and he holds a high place among the loving interpreters of Nature.

To relate facts in his life to account for the development of his powers, so that he was able to be so great a revealer of the highest things in the lives of men and women, should have been the work of his biographers.

It is worthy of note that Wordsworth wrote to the publishers of the biography of Burns in regard to the true attitude of a biographer. He objected to recording imputed failings, and expressed indignation at Dr Currie for devoting so much attention to the infirmities of Burns.

Chambers and Douglas were in most respects better than his other early biographers. The Rev. Lauchlan MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, wrote for the Nation’s Library in 1914 the sanest, truest book yet written about Burns.

CHAPTER II.

The Educational Advantages of Burns.

Many people still speak of Burns as an ‘uneducated man.’ Although a farmer, he was in reality a well-educated man. He was not a finished scholar in the accepted sense of the universities, but both in his poetry and in his unusually forceful and polished prose he was superior to most of the university men of his time. He had read many books, the best books that his intelligent father could buy, or that he could borrow from friends or from libraries. In addition to school-books, he names the following among those books read in his youth and young manhood—The Spectator, Pope’s Works, Shakespeare, Works on Agriculture, The Pantheon, Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, Justice’s British Gardener, Boyle Lectures, Allan Ramsay’s Works, Doctor Taylor’s Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, Hervey’s Meditations, Thomson’s Works, Shenstone’s Works, The Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s Reign, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Macpherson’s Ossian, two volumes of Pamela, and one novel by Smollett, Ferdinand, Count Fathom. In addition to these he had read some French and some Latin books, guided by one of the greatest teachers of his time, John Murdoch, who was so great that when he established a private school in London his fame spread to France, and some leading young men, notably Talleyrand, came to receive his training and inspiration.

William Burns read regularly at night to his two sons, Robert and Gilbert, and after the reading the three fellow-students discussed the matter that had been read, each from his own individual standpoint. As the boys grew older they read books during their meals, so earnest were they in their desire to become acquainted with the best thought of the world’s leaders, so far as it was available. David Sillar has stated that Robert generally carried a book with him when he was alone, that he might read and think. When Robert settled at Ellisland he aroused an interest among the people of the district, and succeeded in establishing a circulating library.

His father, though a labourer, was supremely desirous that his family should be educated and thoughtful. This desire prompted him to become a farmer, that he might keep his family at home. He was an independent thinker himself, and by example and experience he trained his sons to love reading and to think independently. Robert never thought he was thinking when he let other people’s thoughts run through his mind.

The result of the reading and thinking which their father led Robert and Gilbert to do was most gratifying. The influence on Robert’s mind must be recognised. He became not only a great writer in prose and in poetry, but a great orator as well. He stood modestly, but conscious of his power, and proved his superiority both in conversation and impromptu oratory to the leading university men of his time in Edinburgh. Gilbert, too, became an original thinker and a writer of clear and forceful English. In a long letter to Dr Currie he discussed very profoundly and very independently some deep psychological ideas in excellent language. Few men of his time could have written more thoughtfully or more definitely. As illustrations of Robert’s learning, as well as of his independent thought in relating the books he read to each other and to human life, two instances are worth recording. First, in a letter to Dr Moore,[1] of London, an author of some distinction, who had sent him a copy of one of his books, Burns said, 1790: ‘You were pleased to express a wish for my opinion of your work, which so flattered me that nothing less would serve my overweening fancy than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett in your different qualities and merits as novel writers. This, I own, betrays my ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear, but I am fond of the spirit young Elihu shows in the Book of Job—“And I said, I will also declare my opinion.”’

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘Dryden’s Virgil has delighted me. I do not know whether the critics will agree with me, but the Georgics are to me by far the best of Virgil. It is indeed a species of writing entirely new to me, and has filled my head with a thousand fancies of emulation.... I own I am disappointed in the Æneid. Faultless correctness may please, and does highly please, the letter critic; but to that awful character I have not the most distant pretensions. I do not know whether I do not hazard my pretensions to be a critic of any kind, when I say that I think Virgil, in many instances, a servile copier of Homer. If I had the Odyssey by me, I could parallel many passages where Virgil has evidently copied, but by no means improved, Homer. Nor can I think there is anything of this owing to the translators; for from everything I have seen of Dryden, I think him in genius and fluency of language Pope’s Master.’

But a small percentage of university graduates of his time could have written independent criticisms, wise or otherwise, of Homer and Virgil, or even of English writers, as clearly as Burns did. They could have told what the opinions of other people were in regard to Homer and Virgil; they could have told what they had been told. Burns had been trained to think by his father, and to express his own thoughts about the books he read; they had merely been informed. The advantage in real education was greatly in favour of Burns. Their memories had been stored with opinions of others; his mind had been trained to read carefully, to relate the thoughts of others to life, to decide as to their wisdom, and to think independently himself. His education from books was somewhat limited, but the development of his mind that came from discussions of the value of the matter read was vital, and helped him to relate himself to men, to nature around him, to the universe, and to God.

In schools Burns had not a very extended experience. When six years old he was sent to a small school beside the mill on the Doon at Alloway. His teacher gave up the school soon after Burns began to attend it. Mr Burns secured the co-operation of several of his neighbours, and they engaged a young man named Murdoch to teach their children, agreeing to take him in turn as their guest, and to pay him a small salary. The fact that John Murdoch formed a high estimate of Mr Burns is a proof of the ability and sincerity of the father of the poet.

When Burns was seven years old his father removed to Mount Oliphant farm, but Robert continued to attend the school of Mr Murdoch, about two miles away, in Alloway. The books used were a spelling-book, the New Testament, the Bible, Mason’s Collection of Prose and Verse, and Fisher’s English Grammar.

Mr Murdoch gave up his Alloway school when Burns was nine years old. After that time the teacher of his sons was their father. He taught them arithmetic, and bought them Salmon’s Geographical Grammar, Derham’s Physico- and Astro-Theology, Hay’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, and the History of the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. of England. Robert, when eleven years old, showed a deep interest in the study of grammar and language, and ‘excelled as a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles.’ In his twelfth year he was kindled in his patriotic spirit by the Life of Sir William Wallace. Wallace remained a hero to him throughout his life. In his thirty-fifth year he wrote the grandest call to the defence of liberty ever written, beginning:

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.

In his eleventh year, which seemed to be a kindling epoch in his mind, his mother’s brother gave him a collection of Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s Reign. He read them over and over again, greatly delighted by both their contents and their literary style. They had a distinct influence in forming his own prose style, as during his twelfth year he conducted an imaginary correspondence of quite an extensive character and in a stately style.

When he was thirteen the greatest kindler of his early powers, John Murdoch, became teacher of English in the Ayr High School. Robert was sent to board with him to study grammar and composition. He received instruction from Murdoch in French and in Latin. He continued the study of French in the evenings at home, as he had obtained a French dictionary and a French grammar.

His formal education, so far as it became an element in the cultivation of his mind and the development of his supreme powers, ended with the few weeks spent with John Murdoch in Ayr. They were epoch weeks to Burns; transforming weeks, because of the increased range of his learning, but made infinitely more richly transforming by the revelation of new visions of life, and by the culture gained by association with a man of rare ability and supreme kindling power, such as John Murdoch undoubtedly possessed. A genius like Burns, living with a great teacher like Murdoch, could in a month get many of the new revelations, the new visions, and the strong impulses that should come into a growing soul as the result of a university course.

Burns, in his seventeenth year, was sent to Kirkoswald to study mensuration and surveying. He intended to become a surveyor. Peggy Thomson lived next door to the school he attended. He met Peggy, loved her madly, and found it impossible to study longer. He afterwards wrote two beautiful poems to her. His school life for a brief period in Kirkoswald had little influence in the development of his power, except for the organisation of a debating society composed of a companion, William Niven, and himself. They met weekly to hold debates, and these debates were greatly enjoyed by Burns. His practice in debating societies afterwards organised by him in Tarbolton and in Mauchline not only developed in him his unusual oratorical ability, but at the same time gave him mental training of vital importance. Impromptu speaking surpasses any other known educational process in developing the human mind. However, Burns could neither study for Hugh Rodger nor debate with William Niven after he fell in love with Peggy Thomson, so, after a sleepless week, he went home.

Some may wonder, when they learn that for a time Burns took more interest in studying Euclid’s Elements of Geometry than in any other department of study in his home under his father’s guidance. When the Rev. Archibald Alison sent him his book, Essays on the Principles of Taste, Burns thanked him, and in his letter said: ‘In short, sir, except Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father’s fireside in the winter evenings of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added so much to my stock of ideas, as your Essays on the Principles of Taste.’

Burns evidently studied geometry at the time his mind was ripe for new development by that special study. All children and young people would be fortunate if they could be guided to the special study capable of arousing their deepest interest, and therefore capable of promoting their highest development, at the special period of their mental growth when that particular study will awaken their deepest and most productive interest.

Robert’s mind appears to have had a splendid power of adaptation to the books and studies which his father secured for his sons. Gilbert says: ‘Robert read all these with an avidity and industry scarcely to be equalled; and no book was so voluminous as to slacken his industry, or so antiquated as to damp his researches.’ Dr Moore wrote to Burns in 1787: ‘I know very well you have a mind capable of attaining knowledge by a shorter process than is commonly used, and I am certain you are capable of making better use of it, when attained, than is generally done.’

This makes it easier to understand why Burns had a mind so well stored with so many kinds of knowledge; and knowledge classified by himself, and related to life, so well that he could use it readily when he required to do so. The university men in Edinburgh marvelled more at the vastness of his stores of different kinds of knowledge, when he met them with dignified calmness, than they did because of his wonderful gifts of poetic genius. Douglas says of Burns in Edinburgh: ‘Burns did not fail to mix by times with the eminent men of letters and philosophy, who then shed lustre on the name of Scotland.’

Lockhart wrote: ‘Burns’s poetry might have procured him access to these circles; but it was the extraordinary resources he displayed in conversation, the strong sagacity of his observations on life and manners, the splendour of his wit, and the glowing energy of his eloquence, that made him the serious object of admiration among these practised masters of the arts of talk. Even the stateliest of these philosophers had enough to do to maintain the attitude of equality when brought into contact with Burns’s gigantic understanding; and every one of them whose impressions on the subject have been recorded agrees in pronouncing his conversation to have been the most remarkable thing about him.’

Speaking of this, Chambers properly says: ‘We are thus left to understand that the best of Burns has not been, and was not of a nature to be, transmitted to posterity.’ Why was Burns, though a ploughman, able to meet a galaxy of leaders in different spheres of learning, and culture, and philosophy, and outshine any of them in his own special department? The answer is simple. He had two great teachers to kindle him and guide him in the development of his remarkable natural powers: his father, William Burns, and his teacher and friend, John Murdoch.

His father made it certain that he would possess a wide range of knowledge of the best available books on religious, ethical, and philosophical subjects—philosophy of science and philosophy of the mind; and, better than that, he trained him definitely by nightly practice to digest, and expound, and relate, and even dare to disbelieve, the opinions expressed in the books he read. In nightly discussions with his father and Gilbert his mind became keen and broad, and he became self-reliant. He had not merely stored knowledge in his mind, he had wrought the knowledge into his being, as an element of his growing power. Like great players of chess who sometimes meet several opposing players of eminence at the same time and vanquish them all at one period of play, Burns could meet the leaders of many departments of progress, culture, and philosophy at the same time, and stand calm and serene in glory with each leader on the crest of his own special mountain of knowledge.

From John Murdoch he received the inspiration of a vital comradeship, a fine training in English language—grammar, and a good introduction to literature—and visions of higher relationships to his fellow-men and to God.

However, great as Murdoch was as a kindler and a teacher, the education of Robert Burns was mainly due to his remarkable father. Alexander Smith, in his memoir of Burns, which Douglas claimed to be ‘the finest biography of its extent ever written,’ speaking of William Burns, says: ‘In his whole mental build and training he was superior to the people by whom he was surrounded. He had forefathers he could look back to; he had family traditions which he kept sacred. Hard-headed, industrious, religious, somewhat austere, he ruled his house with a despotism which affection and respect on the part of the ruled made light and easy. To the blood of the Burnses a love of knowledge was native, as valour in the old times was native to the blood of the Douglases.’

John Murdoch wrote of William Burns: ‘Although I cannot do justice to the character of this worthy man, yet you will perceive from what I have written what kind of person had the principal part in the education of the poet. He spoke the English language with more propriety, both with respect to diction and pronunciation, than any man I ever knew with no greater advantages; this had a very good effect on the boys, who talk and reason like men much sooner than their neighbours.’

These two quotations help us to understand William Burns as a great teacher of his sons, and his daughters, too, although he did not deem it quite so important to educate his daughters as his sons. It is perfectly clear that the paternal despotism spoken of by Mr Smith, which indeed was supposed to be necessary one hundred and fifty years ago, was not the reason why his boys so early talked and reasoned like men. William Burns was the elderly friend of his sons, not a despot, when he trained them to love reading, and much better to speak freely their individual opinions about what they read. This naturally led his sons to speak like men early and fearlessly. Despotism on the part of the father would have had directly the opposite effect.

Gilbert Burns sums up his father’s estimate of early education and good training when he says: ‘My father laboured hard, and lived with the most rigid economy, that he might be able to keep his children at home, thereby having an opportunity of watching the progress of our young minds and forming in them early habits of piety and virtue; and from this motive alone did he engage in farming, the source of all his difficulties and distresses.’

Robert, after his father’s death, wrote to his cousin, and said his father was ‘the best of friends, and the ablest of instructors.’

In the sketch of his life sent to Dr Moore, of London, he wrote: ‘My father, after many years of wanderings and sojournings, picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my pretensions to wisdom.’

An important element in the education of Burns was his love of Nature. His mind was specially susceptible to development by Nature in any of its forms of beauty or of majesty. A friend who was his guide through the grounds of Athole House, when he was making his tour through the Highlands, in a letter to Mr Alex. Cunningham, wrote: ‘I had often, like others, experienced the pleasures which arise from the sublime or elegant landscape, but I never saw those feelings so intense as in Burns.’

Burns was born and spent his early life and young manhood in a district whose beauty has few equals anywhere. Its rivers—Ayr, Doon, Afton, Lugar, Fail, and Cessnock; all, except Afton, within easy walking distance of his homes in Ayrshire—with their beautifully wooded banks, were, in a very definite way, transforming agencies in the growth of his mind, and therefore most important elements in his highest education. The ‘winding Nith,’ which flowed within a few yards of the home he built on Ellisland farm, around the promontory on which stand the ruins of Lincluden Abbey, and on through Dumfries, continued during the last few years of his life the educational work of the rivers of his native Ayrshire.

The mind of Burns was brought into unity with spiritual ideals through the influence of Nature more productively than by any other agency. He walked in the gloaming, according to his own statement, by the riverside or in woodland paths when he was composing his poems. While residing in Dumfries he had a favourite walk up the Nith to Lincluden Abbey, amid whose ruins he sat in the gloaming, and on moonlight nights often till midnight, recording the visions that came to him in that sacred environment of wooded river and linn (waterfall).

There was much similarity between the most vital educational development of Burns and of Mrs Browning. In Aurora Leigh, the record of her own growth, she describes her true education, although not her actual life’s history. Aurora loses her mother in her fifth year, and lives with her father for nine great years near Florence; she says:

So nine full years our days were hid with God
Among His mountains. I was just thirteen,
Still growing like a plant from unseen roots
In tongue-tied springs; and suddenly awoke
To full life, and life’s needs and agonies,
With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father. Life struck sharp on death
Makes awful lightning.

Her years till thirteen are spent mainly in her father’s fine library reading what she most loved of the treasuries of the world. Her own statement of her father’s educational guidance is:

My father taught me what he had learnt the best
Before he died, and left me—grief and love;
And seeing we had books among the hills,
Strong words of counselling souls, confederate
With vocal pines and waters, out of books
He taught me all the ignorance of men,
And how God laughs in heaven when any man
Says, ‘Here I’m learned; this I understand;
In that I’m never caught at fault or doubt.’

Like Burns she reads good books with joyous interest; like Burns she has a father deeply interested in her education who teaches her vital things; and like Burns she loves to learn from the ‘vocal pines and waters,’ and finds her richest revelations for her mind ‘with God among His mountains.’

The hills of Ayrshire, the rivers, and the river-glens, whose sides are covered with beautiful trees, were to Burns kindlers of high ideals, and revealers of God.

CHAPTER III.

The Characteristics of Burns.

He was a truly independent democrat. The love of liberty was the basic element of his character. His fundamental philosophy he expressed in the unanswered and unanswerable questions:

Why should ae man better fare,
And a’ men brothers?
Epistle to Dr Blacklock.

If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave,
By Nature’s law designed,
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
Man was Made to Mourn.

To the Right Hon. John Francis Erskine he wrote: ‘The partiality of my countrymen has brought me forward as a man of genius, and has given me a character to support. In the Poet I have avowed manly and independent sentiments, which I trust will be found in the Man.’

Referring to the fact that his father’s family rented land from the ‘famous, noble Keiths,’ and had the honour of sharing their fate—their estates were forfeited because they took part in the rebellion of 1715—he says: ‘Those who dare welcome Ruin and shake hands with Infamy, for what they believe sincerely to be the cause of their God and their King, are—as Mark Antony in Shakespeare says of Brutus and Cassius—“Honourable men.”’

Though his father was not born in 1715, he undoubtedly got from his family the principles of independence and the love of liberty which he afterwards taught to his sons, and which Robert propagated with so much zeal.

In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: ‘Light be the turf upon his breast who taught, “Reverence thyself.”’

To Lord Glencairn, after expressing his gratitude, he said: ‘My gratitude is not selfish design—that I disdain; it is not dodging after the heel of greatness—that is an offering you disdain. It is a feeling of the same kind with my devotion.’

In many of his letters he expresses the same sentiments. In his Epistle to his young friend, Andrew Aiken, he advises him, among other things,

To gather gear by every wile
That’s justified by honor;
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant;
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.

In a letter to Mr William Dunbar, dealing with his consciousness of his responsibility for his children, he wrote, 1790: ‘I know the value of independence; and since I cannot give my sons an independent fortune, I shall give them an independent line of life.’

Writing to Mrs Dunlop about his son—her god-son—Burns said: ‘I am myself delighted with the manly swell of his little chest, and a certain miniature dignity in the carriage of the head, and the glance of his fine black eye, which promise the undaunted gallantry of an independent mind.’

In ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ he says:

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d ‘a lord,’
Wha struts, and stares, and a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that. blockhead
For a’ that, and a’ that,
His ribband, star, and a’ that,
The man o’ independent mind
He looks and laughs at a’ that.

In the same great poem he crystallises a fundamental truth in the immortal couplet:

The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that. gold

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1787: ‘I trust I have too much pride for servility, and too little prudence for selfishness.’

To Mrs M’Lehose he wrote in 1788: ‘The dignifying and dignified consciousness of an honest man, and the well-grounded trust in approving heaven, are two most substantial foundations of happiness.’

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: ‘Two of my adored household gods are independence of spirit and integrity of soul.’

To Mrs Graham he wrote in 1791: ‘May my failings ever be those of a generous heart and an independent mind.’

To John Francis Erskine he wrote in 1793: ‘My independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.’

In the ‘Vision’ the message he says he received from Coila, the genius of Kyle, the part of Ayrshire in which he was born, was:

Preserve the dignity of Man, with soul erect.

Burns has been criticised for meddling with what his critics called politics. The highest messages Christ gave to the world were the value of the individual soul, and brotherhood based on the unity of developed individual souls. His highest messages were understood by Burns more clearly than by any one else during his time, and Burns was too great a man to be untrue to his greatest visions. His poems are still among the best interpretations of Christ’s ideals of democracy and brotherhood.

The supreme aim of Burns was to secure for all men and women freedom from the unnatural restrictions of class or custom, so that each individual might have equal opportunity for the development of his highest element of power, his individuality, or self-hood—really the image of God in each. God gave him the vision of the ideal: ‘Why should ae man better fare, and a’ men brothers?’ and he tried to reveal the great vision to the world to kindle the hearts of men.

Burns was a devoted son, and a loving, considerate, respectful, and generous brother. After his father died, Robert wrote to his cousin: ‘On the 13th current I lost the best of fathers. Though, to be sure, we have had long warning of the impending stroke, still the feelings of nature claim their part, and I cannot recollect the tender endearments and paternal lessons of the best of friends and the ablest of instructors without feeling what, perhaps, the calmer dictates of reason would partly condemn.

‘I hope my father’s friends in your country will not let their connection in this place die with him. For my part, I shall ever with pleasure—with pride—acknowledge my connection with those who were allied by the ties of blood and friendship to a man whose memory I shall ever honour and revere.’

On the stone above his father’s grave in Alloway Kirkyard are engraved the words Burns wrote as his father’s epitaph:

O ye, whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
Draw near with pious reverence and attend!
Here lies the loving husband’s dear remains,
The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;
The pitying heart that felt for human woe;
The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;
The friend of man—to vice alone a foe;
For ev’n his failings leaned to virtue’s side.

John Murdoch warmly approved of this epitaph of his former pupil and friend Robert. He wrote: ‘I have often wished, for the good of mankind, that it were as customary to honour and perpetuate the memory of those who excel in moral rectitude, as it is to extol what are called heroic actions.’

When Burns found that the Edinburgh edition of his poems had brought him about five hundred pounds, he loaned Gilbert one hundred and fifty pounds to assist him to get out of debt, in order that his mother and sisters might be placed in a position of security and greater happiness. In a letter to Robert Graham of Fintry, explaining the circumstances that led him to accept the position of an exciseman, he first explains that Ellisland farm, which he rented, was in the last stage of worn-out poverty when he got possession of it, and that it would take some time before it would pay the rent. Then he says: ‘I might have had cash to supply the deficiencies of these hungry years; but I have a younger brother and three sisters on a farm in Ayrshire, and it took all my surplus over what I thought necessary for my farming capital to save not only the comfort, but the very existence, of that fireside circle from impending destruction.’

He helped with sympathy, advice, and material support a younger brother who lived in England. His true attitude towards his own wife and family is shown in his ‘Epistle to Dr Blacklock’:

To make a happy fireside clime
For weans and wife,
Is the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

The greatest dread of his later years was that he might not be able to provide for his family in case of his death.

Burns was an upright, honest man. To the mother of the Earl of Glencairn he wrote: ‘I would much rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed credit from my profession.’

To James Hamilton, of Glasgow, he wrote: ‘Among some distressful emergencies that I have experienced in life, I have ever laid it down as my foundation of comfort—that he who has lived the life of an honest man has by no means lived in vain.’

To Sir John Whitefoord he wrote in 1787: ‘Reverence to God and integrity to my fellow-creatures I hope I shall ever preserve.’

In a letter to John M’Murdo in 1793 he wrote: ‘To no man, whatever his station in life, have I ever paid a compliment at the expense of truth.’

In ‘Lines written in Friar’s Carse’ he wrote:

Keep the name of Man in mind,
And dishonour not your kind.

To Robert Ainslie he wrote: ‘It is much to be a great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man.’

To Andrew Aiken, in his ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ he wrote:

Where you feel your honour grip,
Let that aye be your border.

In ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ he expresses his faith in righteousness as a fundamental element in character, where he says:

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Burns had a sympathetic heart that overflowed with kindness for his fellow-men, and even for animals, domestic and wild. In a letter to the Rev. G. H. Baird in 1791 he said: ‘I am fain to do any good that occurs in my very limited power to a fellow-creature, just for the selfish purpose of clearing a little the vista of retrospection.’

It was the big heart of Burns that directed the writing of the first part of that sentence, and his modesty that led to the expression of the second part. The joy of remembering a good deed was never his chief reason for doing it. In a ‘Tragic Fragment’ he wrote:

With sincere though unavailing sighs
I view the helpless children of distress.

A number of stories have been preserved to prove that while Burns was strict and stern in dealing with smugglers, and others who made a practice of breaking the law by illegally selling strong drink without licence, he was tenderly kind and protective to poor women who had little stores of refreshments to sell to their friends on fair and market days.

Professor Gillespie related that he overheard Burns say to a poor woman of Thornhill one fair-day as she stood at her door: ‘Kate, are you mad? Don’t you know that the Supervisor and I will be in upon you in the course of forty minutes? Good-bye t’ye at present.’

His friendly hint saved a poor widow from a heavy fine of several pounds, while the annual loss to the revenue would be only a few shillings.

He was ordered to look into the case of another old woman, suspected of selling home-brewed ale without licence. When she knew his errand she said: ‘Mercy on us! are ye an exciseman? God help me, man! Ye’ll surely no inform on a puir auld body like me, as I hae nae other means o’ leevin’ than sellin’ my drap o’ home-brewed to decent folk that come to Holywood Kirk.’

Burns patted her on the shoulder and said: ‘Janet, Janet, sin awa’, and I’ll protect ye.’

In ‘A Winter Night’ Burns reveals a deep and genuine sympathy with the outlying cattle, the poor sheep hiding from the storm, the wee helpless birds, and even for the fox and the wolf; and mourns because the pitiless tempest beats on them.

Carlyle says of ‘A Winter Night’ that ‘it is worth seven homilies on mercy, for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns indeed lives in sympathy; his soul rushes into all the realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him.’

The auld farmer’s ‘New Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie,’ reveals a profound and affectionate sympathy more tender than the pity he felt for the animals and birds that suffered from the winter storm. It is based on long years of friendly association in co-operative achievement. From the New Year’s wish at the beginning, to the end, where he assures her that she is no less deserving now than she was

That day ye pranced wi’ muckle pride
When ye bure hame my bonnie bride;
And sweet and gracefu’ she did ride
Wi’ maiden air!

and tells her that he has a heapet feed of oats laid by for her, and will also tether her on a reserved ridge of fine pasture, where she may have plenty to eat and a comfortable place on which to rest; each verse is full of pleasant memories.

His kindly sympathy is as appreciative as if she had been a human being instead of a mare.

‘Poor Mailie’s Elegy’ is a natural expression of sorrow in the heart—the great, loving heart of Burns—for the death of the pet lamb. He says:

He’s lost a friend and neighbour dear
In Mailie dead.
Thro’ a’ the toun she trotted by him;
A lang half-mile she could descry him;
Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him,
She ran wi’ speed;
A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him,
Than Mailie dead.

So in the pathos and emotion shown for the mouse whose home his plough destroyed at the approach of winter; for the wounded hare that limped past him; for the starving thrush with which he offered to share his last crust; and for the scared water-fowl that flew from him, when he regretted that they had reason to do so on account of man’s treatment of them, he gives ample evidence of the warmth of the glow of his sympathy.

One of the most prominent characteristics of Burns was loyalty to his native land. One of his earliest dreams, when he was a boy, was a hope that some day he might be able to do something that would bring honour to Scotland. In his Epistle to Mrs Scott of Wauchope-House he says:

I mind it weel, in early date,
When I was beardless, young, and blate, bashful
······
When first amang the yellow corn
A man I reckoned was,
······
E’en then a wish (I mind its power),
A wish that to my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast;
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake
Some usefu’ plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear, barley
I turned the weeder-clips aside
And spared the symbol dear:
No nation, no station,
My envy e’er could raise;
A Scot still, but blot still, without
I knew nae higher praise.

The boy who had such a reverent feeling in his heart for the thistle, the symbol of his native land, that he did not like to cut it, continued throughout his life to have a reverence for the land itself, and tried to honour it in every possible way.

He did make the book and sing the songs that brought more lasting glory to Scotland than any other work done by any other man or combination of men in his time.

He wrote more than two hundred and fifty love-songs, and he refused to accept a shilling for them, though he needed money very badly. Many of his love-songs were the direct out-pouring of his heart, the overflow of his love for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson, the girl lovers of his boyhood; and for Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose; but most of his love-songs were ‘fictitious,’ as he said they were in the inscription on the copy of his works presented to Jean Lorimer, the Chloris of his Ellisland and Dumfries period. They were written mainly to provide pure language and thought for fine melodies of Scotland composed long before his time; but the words of the songs that were sung to them were indelicate. He wrote his unequalled songs for Scotland’s sake, and by doing so he gave to Scotland the gift of the sweetest love-songs ever written. But for these sacred songs his patriotic spirit resented the idea of acceptance of material reward. No higher revelation of genuine patriotism was ever shown than this.

Burns was a sensitive and very shy man. He is commonly supposed to have been just the opposite. He was brought up in a home at Mount Oliphant where he rarely associated with other people. Months sometimes passed without an evening spent in any other way than in reading and discussions of the matter read by his father, Gilbert, and himself; so in boyhood and early youth he was reserved. When he began to go out among other young men his comparatively developed mind, his very unusual stores of knowledge—not merely stored, but classified and related—and his extraordinary power of eloquence made him at once a leader and a favourite, so he soon overcame his reserve and shyness with young men. It was not so with young women. He had been trained to wait for introductions to them. He was walking past Jean Armour, when she was at the town pump at Mauchline getting water to sprinkle the clothes on the bleaching-green, without speaking to her, and she spoke to him, recalling a remark she heard him make at the annual dance on the evening of the fair. He was twenty-five, and she was eighteen. He would have passed close to her in respectful silence if she had not spoken.

Sir Walter Scott wrote: ‘I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential.’

Scott did not mean to suggest a doubt about what he was told, but just to intimate that he had not had opportunity to observe the fact. Scott met Burns only once in company, and Scott was a boy at the time.

He dearly and reverently loved Alison Begbie when he was twenty-one. She was the first woman whom he asked to become his wife. She was a servant in a farm-house on the banks of Cessnock Water, in the neighbourhood of Lochlea farm. He was twenty-two when he asked her to marry him, and he was so shy, even at that age, that he could not propose when he was with her. She did not accept his offer. Few women of his acquaintance would have refused to accept his written proposal. Probably none of them—not even Alison Begbie—would have refused him if he had been able to overcome his shyness, and had proposed in person instead of by letter.

He wrote five letters to Alison Begbie, and definitely asked her to marry him in the fourth letter. In the first he said: ‘I am a stranger in these matters, as I assure you that you are the first woman to whom I ever made such a declaration, so I declare I am at a loss how to proceed. I have more than once come into your company with a resolution to say what I have just now told you; but my resolution always failed me, and even now my heart trembles for the consequence of what I have said.’

The following copies of the letter containing his proposal (the fourth), and of his reply to her refusal, if read carefully, should reveal several admirable characteristics of Burns.

‘Lochlea, 1781.

‘My Dear E.,[2]—I have often thought it a peculiarly unlucky circumstance in love that, though in every other situation in life, telling the truth is not only the safest, but actually by far the easiest way of proceeding, a Lover is never under greater difficulty in acting, or more puzzled for expression, than when his passion is sincere, and his intentions are honourable. I do not think that it is very difficult for a person of ordinary capacity to talk of love and fondness which are not felt, and to make vows of constancy and fidelity which are never intended to be performed, if he be villain enough to practise such detestable conduct; but to a man whose heart glows with the principles of integrity and truth, and who sincerely loves a woman of amiable person, uncommon refinement of sentiment, and purity of manners—to such a one in such circumstances I can assure you, my Dear, from my own feelings at this present moment, Courtship is a task indeed.

There is such a number of foreboding fears, and distrustful anxieties crowd into my mind when I am in your company, or when I sit down to write to you, that what to speak or what to write I am altogether at a loss.

‘There is one rule which I have hitherto practised, and which I shall invariably keep with you, and that is, honestly to tell you the plain truth. There is something so mean and unmanly in the arts of dissimulation and falsehood, that I am surprised they can be used by any one in so noble, so generous a passion as Virtuous Love. No, my dear E., I shall never endeavour to gain your favour by such detestable practices. If you will be so good and so generous as to admit me for your partner, your companion, your bosom friend through life, there is nothing on this side of eternity shall give me greater transport; but I shall never think of purchasing your hand by any arts unworthy of a man, and, I will add, of a Christian. There is one thing, my Dear, which I earnestly request of you, and it is this: that you would soon either put an end to my hopes by a peremptory refusal, or cure me of my fears by a generous consent.

‘It would oblige me much if you would send me a line or two when convenient. I shall only add further, that if a behaviour regulated (though perhaps but very imperfectly) by the rules of Honour and Virtue, if a heart devoted to love and esteem you, and an earnest endeavour to promote your happiness; if these are qualities you would wish in a friend, in a husband, I hope you shall ever find them in your real friend and sincere lover.’

After her refusal he wrote:

‘Lochlea, 1781.

‘I ought in good manners to have acknowledged the receipt of your letter before this time, but my heart was so shocked with the contents of it, that I can scarcely yet collect my thoughts so as to write to you on the subject. I will not attempt to describe what I felt on receiving your letter. I read it over and over, again and again, and though it was in the politest language of refusal, still it was peremptory; you “were very sorry you could not make me a return, but you wish me—what without you I can never obtain—you wish me all kinds of happiness.” It would be weak and unmanly to say that without you I never can be happy; but sure I am, that sharing life with you would have given it a relish that, wanting you, I can never taste.

‘Your uncommon personal advantages, and your superior good sense, do not so much strike me; these possibly in a few instances may be met with in others; but that amiable goodness, that tender, feminine softness, that endearing sweetness of disposition, with all the charming offspring of a warm, feeling heart—these I never again expect to meet with in such a degree in this world. All these charming qualities, heightened by an education much beyond anything I have ever met with in any woman I ever dared to approach, have made an impression on my heart that I do not think the world can ever efface. My imagination had fondly flattered itself with a wish—I dare not say it ever reached a hope—that possibly I might one day call you mine. I had formed the most delightful images, and my fancy fondly brooded over them; but now I am wretched for the loss of what I really had no right to expect. I must now think no more of you as a mistress, still I presume to ask to be admitted as a friend. As such I wish to be allowed to wait on you, and as I expect to remove in a few days a little farther off, and you, I suppose, will perhaps soon leave this place, I wish to see you or hear from you soon; and if an expression should perhaps escape me rather too warm for friendship, I hope you will pardon it in, my dear Miss —— (pardon me the dear expression for once),

‘R. B.’

Those who say that these letters ‘have an air of taskwork and constraint about them’ should remember that Burns formed the style of his letter-writing when but a boy from a book containing the letters of leaders of Queen Anne’s time, which was given to him by his uncle. His own letters on all subjects are written in a dignified style. It is worth noting that Motherwell, who criticised the style of the letters, says of them: ‘They are, in fact, the only sensible love-letters we have ever seen.’

Though naturally a very shy man, he grew to be happier as his powers developed. In his teens and young manhood he had fits bordering on despondency. But he passed through them and became more buoyant in spirit, and, though poor, was contented.

In ‘My Nannie O’ he wrote:

Come weel, come woe, I care na by,
I’ll tak what Heaven will sen’ me.

In ‘It is na, Jean, thy Bonnie Face,’ he said:

Content am I if Heaven shall give
But happiness to thee.

This shows that consideration for others was one of his sources of happiness.

In his ‘Epistle to James Smith’ he wrote:

Truce with peevish, poor complaining!
Is Fortune’s fickle Luna waning?
E’en let her gang!
Beneath what light she has remaining
Let’s sing our sang.

Dr John M’Kenzie of Mauchline, in 1810, thirteen years after the death of Burns, described a visit made to see his father when he was ill. In it he says: ‘Gilbert, in the first interview I had with him at Lochlea, was frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative. The poet seemed distant, suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please. He kept himself very silent in a dark corner of the room; and before he took any part in the conversation, I frequently detected him scrutinising me during my conversation with his father and brother.

‘But afterwards, when the conversation, which was on a medical subject, had taken the turn he wished, he began to engage in it, displaying a dexterity of reasoning, an ingenuity of reflection, and a familiarity with topics apparently beyond his reach, by which his visitor was no less gratified than astonished.’

Burns lived next door to Dr M’Kenzie after he was married the second time to Jean Armour. They were great friends. Burns wrote a masonic poem to him, and called him ‘Common-sense’ in ‘The Holy Fair.’

In the letter from which the above quotation is made, Dr M’Kenzie says Robert took his characteristics mainly from his mother, and that Gilbert resembled his father.

Burns looked like his mother, and inherited his temperamental characteristics mainly from her.

Burns had a definitely religious tendency as one of his strong characteristics when he was a child. In the sketch of his life that he wrote to Dr Moore, of London, when he was twenty-eight years old, he says that as a boy he possessed ‘an enthusiastic idiot-piety. I say idiot-piety because I was then a child.’

He wrote several religious poems while living on Lochlea farm and on Mossgiel farm. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ was written at Mossgiel.

Throughout his life his religious tendency was one of his characteristics. This will be considered more fully in the chapter on ‘Burns’s Great Work for Religion.’

Burns was the warm, personal friend of the best people in every district in or near which he lived. He must have been a good man who could count among his friends such men and women as the following: Lord Glencairn, Mrs Dunlop, the Earl of Eglintoun, Dr Moore, Dr M’Kenzie, Gavin Hamilton, Hon. Henry Erskine, the Duchess of Gordon, Right Rev. Bishop Geddes, Robert Graham of Fintry, Robert Riddell, Robert Aiken, the Earl of Buchan, Prof. Dugald Stewart, Dr Candlish, Sir John Whitefoord, John Murdoch, Dr Blacklock, Dr Hugh Blair, Alex. Cunningham, Rev. Archibald Alison, Sir John Sinclair, Rev. John M’Math, and the best ministers of the ‘New Licht,’ or progressive class; the leading professors in Edinburgh University, and the leading schoolmasters in his neighbourhood. In fact, he was loved and respected by leaders of all classes except the ‘Auld Licht’ preachers. He lives on and becomes more popular as he becomes better known.

His one characteristic that would most fully represent him and his work for God and humanity is his propelling tendency to be a reformer of conditions. He accepted no existing conditions as good enough. He saw quickly and clearly the defects of conditions as they existed, and he never hesitated to attack any evil that he could help to overthrow. He saw that individual freedom and pure religion were vital and essential elements of human progress and happiness. He saw with unerring vision the lack of freedom and of vital religion in the lives of the people; so to make all men free, to give all children equal opportunity to develop the best in their souls, and to purify religion from superstition, hypocrisy, bigotry, and kindred evils that were blighting it, became his highest purposes.

What was the character of Burns in the estimation of the leading people of his own time? On replying to a request that he would use his influence in favour of Burns for an appointment Sir John Whitefoord wrote: ‘Your character as a man, as well as a poet, entitles you, I think, to the assistance of every inhabitant of Ayrshire.’

Sir John owned the Ballochmyle estate near Mauchline, and was one of the leading country gentlemen of Ayrshire in his time.

Mr Archibald Prentice, editor of the Manchester Times, was the son of a prominent man who lived about half-way between Mauchline and Edinburgh, at Covington, in Lanarkshire. Mr Prentice, senior, was a great admirer of Burns, as were leaders everywhere. Mr Archibald Prentice, writing about his father’s affectionate respect for Burns, said; ‘My father, though a strictly moral and religious man himself, always maintained that the virtues of the poet greatly predominated over his faults. I once heard him exclaim with hot wrath, when somebody was quoting from an apologist, “What! do they apologise for him! One half of his good, and all his bad divided among a score of them, would make them a’ better men!”

‘In the year 1809 I resided for a short time in Ayrshire, in the hospitable house of my father’s friend Reid, and surveyed with a strong interest such visitors as had known Burns. I soon learned how to anticipate their representations of his character. The men of strong minds and strong feelings were invariable in their expressions of admiration; but the prosy, consequential bodies all disliked him as exceedingly dictatorial. The men whose religion was based on intellect and high moral sentiment all thought well of him; but the mere professors [of religion] “with their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces” denounced him as worse than an infidel.’

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 whip
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.’

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.’

In his epistle to his young friend Andrew Aiken, he sums up in two lines his attitude to scepticism:

An atheist’s laugh’s a poor exchange
For Deity offended.

The men who believe most profoundly are those who honestly doubted in early life, but who naturally loved truth, and sought it with hopeful minds till they found it. Burns was not a sceptic. He was a reverently religious man. No man could have written ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ who was not a reverently religious man. His father, from the earliest years, when his children were old enough to understand them, began to teach them fundamental religious principles. They took root deeply in Robert’s mind. William Burns preferred not to use the ‘Shorter Catechism,’ so he wrote a special catechism for his own family. It is a remarkable production for a man in his position in life. It deals with vitally fundamental principles, and shows a clear understanding of the Bible.

Burns wrote several short religious poems in his early young manhood, probably his twenty-second and twenty-third years, showing that his mind was deeply impressed by the majesty, justice, and love of God. Two of these poems are paraphrases of the Psalms.

The fact that religion was one of the most important elements of his thought and life is amply proved by the five letters he wrote to Alison Begbie in his twenty-first and twenty-second years—even before he wrote his early religious poems. Love-letters though they were, they related nearly as much to religion as to love. Some people have tried to say irreverently smart things about the absurdity of writing about religion in letters to his loved one. Both the religion and the love of his letters to the first woman he ever asked to marry him are too sacred to provoke ridicule in the minds of men with proper reverence for either religion or love. No one can carefully read these five letters without having a deeper respect for Burns, the young gentleman who loved so deeply that he regarded love worthy to be placed in association with religion. Religion was the subject that had been given first place in his life and thought by the teaching and the life of his father, who had meant infinitely more to him than most fathers ever mean to their sons.

In his epistle to Andrew Aiken he recommends, in the last verse but one, two things of vast importance ‘when on life we’re tempest-driv’n’: first,

A conscience but a canker. without

Second,

A correspondence fixed wi’ Heaven
Is sure a noble anchor.

Many people read the last couplet without consciously thinking what a correspondence fixed with Heaven means. Clearly it may have three meanings: prayer, communion in spirit with the Divine, and similarity to or harmony with the divine spirit.

Burns had family worship in his home every day to the end of his life when he was not absent, and though some scoffers may smile, he was earnest and sincere in trying to conduct for himself and for his family a ‘correspondence fixed with heaven’ in a spirit of communion with the Divine Father. He had other altars for communion with God in addition to his home. He composed his poems in the gloaming after his day’s work, in favourite spots in the deep woods, where he was ‘hid with God’ alone. God revealed Himself to Burns in the woods and by the sides of his sacred rivers more fully than in any other places. One of the most sacred shrines in Scotland is the great root under one of the mighty beeches of the fine park on Ballochmyle estate, on which Burns sat so often to compose his poems in the long Scottish twilights, and later on in the moonlight, when he lived on Mossgiel farm. Then next night, at his desk over the stable at Mossgiel, he would rewrite them and improve their form.

No man but a religious man would have written, in his ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ as Burns did to Andrew Aiken:

The great Creator to revere
Must sure become the creature.

When in Irvine, in his twenty-third year, he wrote a letter to his father. As usual, he wrote not of trivial matters, but of the great realities of time and eternity. Among other serious things he wrote: ‘My principal, and, indeed, my only pleasurable, employment is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way.’ In the same letter he wrote:

The soul, uneasy and confined, at home
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.[3]

Burns follows this quotation by saying to his father: ‘It is for this reason that I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the 7th Chapter of Revelation than with any ten times as many verses in the whole Bible, and would not exchange the noble enthusiasm with which they inspire me for all that the world has to offer.’

His imagination enabled him to see clearly the glories of joy, and service, and association, and reward, in the heavenly paradise, as revealed in those triumphant verses.

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependence, but my dearest enjoyment.... An irreligious poet would be a monster.’

In his ‘Grace before Eating’ he reveals his gratitude and conscious dependence on God:

O Thou, who kindly dost provide
For every creature’s want!
We bless Thee, God of Nature wide,
For all Thy goodness lent.

In ‘Winter: a Dirge’ he says, in reverent submission to God’s will:

Thou Power supreme, whose mighty scheme
Those woes of mine fulfil,
Here firm I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy Will.

In a poem to Clarinda he wrote, recognising the blessing of Gods universal presence, not in awe so much as in joy:

God is ever present, ever felt,
In the void waste, as in the city full;
And where He vital breathes, there must be joy!

In the ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ he teaches absolute faith in God, and indicates man’s true relationship to the Divine Father:

Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,
Implore His counsel and assisting might:
They never sought in vain, that sought the Lord aright.

Writing in condemnation of a miserably selfish miser, he said:

See these hands, ne’er stretched to save,
Hands that took, but never gave;
Keeper of Mammon’s iron chest,
Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest;
She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest.

And are they of no more avail,
Ten thousand glittering pounds a year?
In other worlds can Mammon fail,
Omnipotent as he is here?
O, bitter mockery of the pompous bier,
While down the wretched Vital Part is driven!
The cave-lodged beggar, with a conscience clear,
Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to heaven.

The philosophy of his mind, and the affectionate sympathy of his heart made Burns believe that unselfish service for our fellow-men should be one of the manifestations of true religion.

In the fine poem he wrote to Mrs Dunlop on New Year’s Day, 1790, he says:

A few days may, a few years must,
Repose us in the silent dust.
Then is it wise to damp our bliss?
Yes—all such reasonings are amiss!
The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies;
That on this frail, uncertain state
Hang matters of eternal weight;
That future life in worlds unknown
Must take its hue from this alone;
Whether as heavenly glory bright,
Or dark as Misery’s woeful night.
Let us the important Now employ,
And live as those who never die.
Since, then, my honoured first of friends,
On this poor living all depends.

Any honest man who reads those lines must admit that Burns was a man of deep religious thought and feeling.

Mrs Dunlop, to whom he wrote so many letters, was one of the leading women of Scotland in her time. She was a woman of great wisdom and deep religious character. Like the other great people who knew Burns, she was his friend. Many of his clearest expressions of his religious opinions are contained in his letters to her. In a letter to her on New Year’s morning, 1789, he said: ‘I have some favourite flowers in Spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birk [birch], and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in the Summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of grey-plover in an Autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery that, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to these proofs of those awful and important realities—a God that made all things—man’s immaterial and immortal nature—and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave—these proofs that we deduct by dint of our own powers of observation. However respectable Individuals in all ages have been, I have ever looked on Mankind in the lump to be nothing better than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking Mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me. Still, I am a very sincere believer in the Bible.’

In September 1789 he wrote to Mrs Dunlop: ‘Religion, my dear friend, is true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least four thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it.’

To Mrs Dunlop, in 1792, he wrote: ‘I am so convinced that an unshaken faith in the doctrines of religion is not only necessary by making us better men, but also by making us happier men, that I shall take every care that your little god-son [his son], and every creature that shall call me father, shall be taught them.’

One of his most beautiful religious letters was written to Alexander Cunningham, of Edinburgh, in 1794: ‘Still there are two pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with and link us to, those awful, obscure realities—an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field; the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.

‘I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most as an uncertain obscurity, which mankind can never know anything of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical ear. I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others, were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of view, and for this reason, that I will deeply imbue the mind of every child of mine with religion. If my son should happen to be a man of feeling, sentiment, and taste, I shall thus add largely to his enjoyments. Let me flatter myself that this sweet little fellow, who is just now running about my desk, will be a man of a melting, ardent, glowing heart; and an imagination, delighted with the painter and rapt with the poet. Let me figure him wandering out in a sweet evening, to inhale the balmy gales, and enjoy the glowing luxuriance of the spring; himself the while in the blooming youth of life. He looks abroad on all Nature, and thro’ Nature up to Nature’s God; his soul, by swift delighting degrees, is rapt above this sublunary sphere, until he can be silent no longer, and bursts out into the glorious enthusiasm of Thomson:

‘“These, as they change, Almighty Father—these
Are but the varied God; the rolling year
Is full of thee.”

‘and so on, in all the spirit and ardour of that charming hymn.

‘These are no ideal pleasures; they are real delights; and I ask what of the delights among the sons of men are superior, not to say equal, to them? And they have this precious, vast addition, that conscious Virtue stamps them for her own, and lays hold on them to bring herself into the presence of a witnessing, judging, and approving God.’

In 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: ‘My definition of worth is short: truth and humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the presence of that Being, my Creator and Preserver, and who, I have every reason to believe, will be my judge.’

Again to Clarinda he wrote in 1788: ‘He who is our Author and Preserver, and will one day be our Judge, must be—not for His sake in the way of duty, but from the natural impulse of our hearts—the object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration. He is almighty and all-bounteous; we are weak and dependent; hence prayer and every other sort of devotion. “He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to everlasting life;” consequently it must be in every one’s power to embrace His offer of everlasting life; otherwise He could not in justice condemn those who did not.’

Again in 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: ‘In proportion as we are wrung with grief, or distracted with anxiety, the ideas of a Compassionate Deity, an Almighty Protector, are doubly dear.’

To Mrs Dunlop, in 1795, a year and a half before he died, he wrote: ‘I have nothing to say to any one as to which sect he belongs to, or what creed he believes; but I look on the man who is firmly persuaded of Infinite Wisdom and Goodness superintending and directing every circumstance that can happen in his lot—I felicitate such a man as having a solid foundation for his mental enjoyment; a firm prop and stay in the hour of difficulty, trouble, and distress; and a never-failing anchor of hope when he looks beyond the grave.’

This quotation emphasises his lifelong faith in God, and his belief in his own immortality. It also shows his perfect freedom from bigotry, and the broadness of his creed.

In his first ‘Commonplace Book’ he wrote: ‘The grand end of Human being is to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life, with every enjoyment that renders life delightful; and to maintain an integritive conduct towards our fellow-creatures; that by so forming Piety and Virtue into habit, we may be fit members for that society of the Pious, and the Good, which reason and revelation teach us to expect beyond the grave.’

There are no truly good men who will yield to the temptation to speak sneeringly of any man who fails in his life to reach his highest ideals. The little-minded men who may sneer at Burns, when they read this quotation written in his youth, should read his ‘Address to the Unco Guid’ over and over, till they get a glimmering comprehension of its meaning. Whatever the puny minds may be focussed on in the life of Burns, they should be ‘mute at the balance.’ They should remember that Burns did more than any man of his time for true religion, and that to the end of his life his mind and heart overflowed with the same faith and gratitude to God that he almost continuously expressed throughout his life.

A final quotation from the letters of Burns about religion may fittingly be taken from a letter to Robert Aiken, written in 1786: ‘O thou unknown Power! Thou Almighty God who hast lighted up Reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me.’

Burns was a reverently religious man. Dean Stanley said: ‘Burns was a wise religious teacher.’ Principal Rainy objected to Dean Stanley’s view because ‘Burns had never become a member of a church on profession of Faith in Christ.’ Professor Rainy either did not remember, or had never realised, that Burns had done more to reveal Christ’s highest teachings—the value of the individual soul, and brotherhood—than any other man in the church, or out of it, in Scotland in his time; and also did more to make religion free from false theology and dwarfing practices, than any other man of his time, or of any other time in Scotland.

Rev. L. MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, in his most admirable book on Burns, answers Principal Rainy’s objections with supreme ability, as the following quotations amply prove: ‘Because a man does not categorically declare his belief in Christ, as that belief is formulated in existing dogmatic statements of theological authority, it does not mean that he abhors that belief; nor even though he withhold himself from explicitly uttering that confession of the Christian faith, does it preclude him from being a religious teacher. A man may have an enormous influence as a religious teacher, and yet never have made a formal statement of Christianity, nor signed a Christian creed.’—‘The measure of a man’s faithfulness to the better side of his nature is not to be gauged by the depth of his fall, but the height to which he rises.... Burns was, unfortunately, confronted by a narrow and self-righteous set, who were enslaved to doctrine and dogma, rather than to the practice of the Christian life with charity and humanity of spirit, part and parcel of a system of petty tyrannies and mean oppressions, the exercise of which made for exile from the fold, because of the spiritual conceit and sectarian humbug which created such characters as “Holy Willie,” and the “Unco Guid,” with the superior airs of religious security from which they looked down on all besides.’