Like some choice lamp's fed brilliant flame Nay, 'twas like radiance of an orb Which poet-skies the best absorb : For, gazed through murkier mental spheres, That soul, 'twas an oped vial filled By his own heart their bloom distilled. Or, 'twas like lightning's crucible— It fired the thunder'd terror-knell Of Satire where the hypocrite cower'd, To wither, scorch, and, cleansing, heal Yes! Woman was to Burns the light And life the mystic brother-sign ; That here but cots in mortal thrall; The Universe's meteless bound, To clasp it in the Godhead crown'd. MRS L. LYDIA ACADIA PANTER (Author of The Swan of Doon, Queen Hadassah's Victory, etc., etc.) Oakleigh, Carlton-Colville, Lowestoft, 20th August, 1912. THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF ROBERT BURNS [We have much pleasure in submitting the following paper, not as an appendix to that of Mr Macintyre, but to show how the subject presents itself to a native of Denmark, who is also a Burns student and enthusiast.] 66 ΑΝ In N honest man's the noblest work of God." these few words we have the creed of Robert Burns. They are spoken by Pope in his Essay on Man, but they are adopted by the Scottish Poet, and form the point of culmination in his "Cottar's Saturday Night," that grand description of the childhood of Burns concentrated into one picture. Let us begin with this wonderful poem and follow the religious development of the Bard. This we cannot find in the poems, still less in his songs. No; we must trace the evolution of his mind in his letters. It would demand a study of many years to investigate. all the letters, diaries, &c., of Burns, and I think the result would not prove much superior to that gained from a more cursory study of those sources. So in the following essay I will endeavour, not to paint a mental picture of the Poet, but to draw the main features of his religious development as we meet it when reading him. The "Cottar" is the beginning. It is the home of Burns, the severe, patriarchal father, the "priestly priestly" man -Abraham en miniature. He strives to live an honest life, but is not, as some people may think, a narrowminded, under-bred, matter-of-fact person who labours and eats and sleeps, and there's an end. No, he is an ethic led by holy light. He is a firm, self-made man, and he brings his children up in earnest, almost deadly, stern Calvinism. That is the childhood of Burns. It is the basis on which the will-be poet must build his inner life. But he has another basis too. He has the poetic gift, the ray of genius. Can he join both? That is the question. The great conflict between these two powers we find beginning at the time when Burns-against his father's will-took part in a dancing school of the neighbourhood, and it deepened as the years passed. The Church strife between the Auld Licht" and the New Licht was the first great crisis of his religious life. 66 He wrote his satires; but while he scourged the sins of the Church, and saw the negative, he knew no real, positive faith himself. The "Cottar" religion has vanished, and he felt himself alone in front of a great problem. Yet we must not infer too much from the satires. Burns wrote them chiefly in order to show his magnificent abilities. The great hindrance to an ordinary development of his religious life was his utter inability to discern the absolute difference between good and evil. Illicit love became poetical, and drunkenness the joy of the free man, and so on. The strife between the better and the worser self of the Poet was continued through all his life, and made it a deadly fight which drained him of strength and made him feeble when facing the great crisis. A closer investigation of this important trait of the character of Burns may be found in Stopford A. Brook's excellent book, Theology in the English Poets. The great interest of Burns, in religion especially, was caused by a severe attack of hypochondria while staying at Irvine. T. F. Henderson thinks this mental illness had its deepest root in "the sudden shattering of his matrimonial hopes," but how may we then account for his later fits of the same disease? From this crisis a few poems survive, all of them showing a search for comfort in religion. In the first Commonplace-Book he wrote the following lines below his fine song, "Green Grow the Rashes “As the grand end of our human life is to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life, with every enjoyment that renders life delightful,... that so by 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, I do not see that the turn of mind and pursuits of such a one as the above verses describe [i.e., love]... are in the least more inimical to the sacred interests of Piety and Virtue than even lawful bustling and straining after the world's riches and honours." This was the main result of the strife of his younger years. He all his life had a religion-though not always Christian, as we shall see-but he would reconcile it with his love affairs and the lower pursuits of man, and that was impossible. was living on a great, tragic inconsistency. So Burns The Kirk strife had shown Burns the decay of certain classes of the clergy. It had spoiled the patriarchism, and made him feel homeless. He stood in front of the gateway of a new life. In a letter to Robert Aiken in the latter part of 1786 he says: "You may perhaps think it an extravagant folly, but it is a sentiment which strikes home to my very soul: though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet, I think, I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stricter bourne of our present existence. If so, then how should I-in the presence of that tremendous Being, the Author of existence-how should I meet the reproaches of those, who stand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in the smiling innocency of helpless infancy? O, Thou great unknown Power! Thou Almighty God! who hast lightened up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality, I have frequently wandered from that order . . . . necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me." God was an unknown Power to him, but he felt a great gratitude to Him, and was beginning a personal religious life. It is the introduction to the Clarinda period. 66 The first essential allusion to these problems of the soul we find in his Edinburgh letters in a short epistle to James Candlish : "Experience of the weakness, not the strength, of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion." These words are not directly Christian ; they might be spoken by a heathen quite as well. But they show us one important thing: Burns was no Deist. He wanted "revealed religion," no self-made dogma, as we may be inclined to think, when reading his later letters. These words show us that Burns was quite aware of his sin, and saw that he could not conquer it himself. The undogmatic belief of Burns we find in a letter to Gavin Hamilton (Dec., 1787): "I seldom pray for anybody, but most fervently do I beseech the Holy Trinity, or the holy something, that directs this world, that you may live long..." The Trinity is only a phrase which he has picked up, and which contains no definition of God. During the Edinburgh stay Burns studied the Bible, i.e., the Old Testament. He says in a letter to Miss Chalmers (Dec. 12, 1787): "I have taken tooth and nail to the Bible, and am got through the five books of Moses, and half way in Joshua. It is really a glorious Book." It was not dogma to him, but it was wonderful poetry. 66 Burns was more man than poet. He was not living in the cloud-encircled Parnassus, but he was walking among men on the earth. So the religion seemed to him—not a gospel of Life, but a gospel of Man. He found the basis for this view in the belief of his father, in the patriarchism; but he moulded it anew. 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 one day be my Judge. The first part of my definition is the creature of unbiased instinct; the last is the child of after-reflection."-(To Clarinda, 4/1, 1788).. The God of Burns is the Author and Preserver of He is the object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration. He is almighty and all-bounteous; we man. 66 |