Delphi Complete Works of Robert Burns (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) (171 page)

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.

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.