The Real Robert Burns Part 5

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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 comrades.h.i.+p from members of the Church, the inst.i.tution 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 superst.i.tion, hypocrisy, bigotry, predestination (taught in its most repellent form in the time of Burns), the equally repellent doctrine that 'G.o.d sends men to h.e.l.l for His own glory;' fear of h.e.l.l 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 mediaeval 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.s.'

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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 G.o.d. 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 a.s.sociation 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 n.o.ble 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d' alone. G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al, 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociation, 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 grat.i.tude and conscious dependence on G.o.d:

O Thou, who kindly dost provide For every creature's want!

We bless Thee, G.o.d of Nature wide, For all Thy goodness lent.

In 'Winter: a Dirge' he says, in reverent submission to G.o.d'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 G.o.ds universal presence, not in awe so much as in joy:

G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day Night' he teaches absolute faith in G.o.d, and indicates man's true relations.h.i.+p to the Divine Father:

Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray, Implore His counsel and a.s.sisting 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.