The Real Robert Burns Part 6

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 h.o.a.ry 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 aeolian harp, pa.s.sive, takes the impression of the pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d-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 n.o.ble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of courage, fort.i.tude, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d.'

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 Compa.s.sionate 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 circ.u.mstance 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 G.o.d, 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 grat.i.tude to G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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.' Princ.i.p.al 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 Princ.i.p.al 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.'

We should test neither the terrible theologians of his time--those men who attacked Burns and called him irreligious, because he had a clear vision of a higher, holier religion than the one they preached--nor Burns himself by the conditions of our own time. It is unjust both to Burns and to his enemies to do so.

A comparison of the religious principles of the best Christians in the world nearly a century and a half after his time will show, however, that the creed of the present is more--much more--like the creed of Burns than the creed of the dreadful theologians of his time. The creed of the religious leaders a century hence will be still more like the creed of Robert Burns than is the creed of to-day.

The following creed is taken from the letters of Burns, expressed in his own language, except the last article, which is found in longer form in many of his letters, and more nearly in 'The Hermit,' in which he says:

Let me, O Lord! from life retire, Unknown each guilty, worldly fire, Remorse's throb, or loose desire; And when I die Let me in this belief expire-- To G.o.d I fly.

THE CREED OF ROBERT BURNS.

1. Religion should be a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich.

2. There is a great and incomprehensible Being to whom I owe my existence.

3. The Creator perfectly understands the being He has made.

4. There is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue.

5. There must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.

6. From the sublimity, the excellence, and the purity of His doctrines and precepts, I believe Jesus Christ came from G.o.d.

7. Whatever is done to mitigate the woes, or increase the happiness of humanity, is goodness.

8. Whatever injures society or any member of it is iniquity.

9. I believe in the immaterial and immortal nature of man.

10. I believe in eternal life with G.o.d.

Carlyle expressed regret that 'Burns became involved in the religious quarrels of his district.' This statement proves that Carlyle failed fully to comprehend the religious character of Burns. His chivalrous nature was partly responsible for his entering the battle waged by the 'Auld Lichts'

against his dear friend the Rev. Dr M'Gill of Ayr and Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline; but his chief reason was his innate determination to free religion from the evils taught and practised in the name of religion in his time. He had the soul of a reformer, and the two leading elements in his soul were Religion and Liberty for the individual. It would have robbed the world of one of the greatest steps in human progress towards the Divine made in the eighteenth century, if Burns had failed to be true to the greatest things in his mind and heart.

Carlyle had clearly not studied the religious elements in either the poems or the letters of Burns, or he could not have written his comparison between Burns and Locke, Milton, and Cervantes, who did in poverty and unusual difficulties grand work. He asks: 'What, then, had these men which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true religious principle of morals, and a single, not a double, aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of Heavenly Wisdom in one form or the other form ever hovered before them.

It pa.s.ses understanding to comprehend how Carlyle could regard Burns as a 'selfish' man, or a man with 'a double aim'--that is, two conflicting and opposing aims that he wasted his power in trying to harmonise.

Burns had three great aims: Purer Religion, a just Democracy, and closer Brotherhood; but these aims are in perfect harmony.

Carlyle ends the contrast between Burns and his model trio--Locke, Milton, and Cervantes--by saying of Burns: 'He has no religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light _forms_ of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men.'

'The heart not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or poetical _Restaurateur_, but of a true poet and singer, worthy of the old religions heroic, had been given him, and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true n.o.bleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride.'

In a just comparison between Burns and the three named by Carlyle, Burns will need no apologists. Burns, directly in opposition to the statement of Carlyle, was more vitally religious and less selfish than any of them.

When twenty-one years of age he said, in one of his beautiful love-letters to Alison Begbie: 'I grasp every creature in the arms of universal benevolence, and equally partic.i.p.ate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.' This alone proves that Burns was one of the least selfish men who ever lived.