Walter McGinty - Robert Burns and Religion

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ROBERT BURNS AND RELIGION

To Jean, my mother,

the great encourager

Robert Burns and Religion

J. WALTER McGINTY

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright J. Walter McGinty, 2003

J. Walter McGinty has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2002038256

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-71478-6 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19784-5 (ebk)

Contents

My thanks are due to the following publishers for granting me permission to quote from their works: Oxford University Press for Robert Burns: The Letters, Volume I: 17801789 and Volume II: 17901796, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson, Second edition edited by G. Ross Roy (1985), and The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Volumes IIII edited by James Kinsley (OUP, 1968), and The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 17871791, edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp (OUP, 1982); also to Carcanet Press Limited for The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart, edited by Marcus Walsh (Manchester, 1972); and Taylor & Francis for The Poetry of Christopher Smart, by Moira Dearnley (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd: London, 1968).

My thanks are also due to Ellen Howden for allowing me to use, on the cover, her photograph of the Robert Burns Memorial Window designed by Susan Bradbury and sited in the Parish Church of Alloway, in the village in which the poet was born.

I am greatly indebted to Dr Kenneth Simpson of the University of Strathclyde for initially encouraging me to further develop my study of Burnss religious thought and for his continued interest in my work. My research was also assisted by the helpfulness of staff at the Carnegie Library, Ayr, and the Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

On a personal note, I want to thank Myra and my family who put up with me, when in the midst of a busy working life my spare time was often spent in research. Thanks too to Nancy for typing the original manuscript of the thesis upon which the early part of this book is based, and to Lois, who, more recently, has helped me towards a calmer use of the computer.

In two of the earliest extant letters of Burns, both to his friend William Niven, a clue is given to an underlying attitude that from time to time surfaces in Burnss writing on the subject of religion. On 3 November 1780, Burns writes to the Maybole merchant:

I shall be happy to hear from you how you go on in the ways of life; I do not mean so much how trade prospers, or if you have the prospect of riches, or the dread of poverty; as how you go on in the cultivation of the finer feelings of the heart.

Then on 12 June 1781, Burns again writes:

Our communion was on Sunday seen night, I mention this to tell you that I saw your cousin there, with some of Mr Hamiltons sons. You cannot imagine how pleased I was to steal a look at him & trace the resemblance of my old friend 1 was prepossed [sic] in his favor on that account, but still more by that ingenuous modesty (a quality so rare amongst students, especialy in the divinity way) which is so apparent in his air & manner.

I suspect that at that time, Burns was attracted to religion because he saw it as something that could contribute to a development of the cultivation of the finer feelings of the heart, but that he was often repelled by some of the attitudes and the behaviour of some of those who professed it. One other thing that emerges from the second letter is that the criticism is made from within a personal relationship with the Church. It is when he is attending the church on a Communion Sunday that he makes the comment on divinity students. This very attendance signals his being a member of the Church as only those who had professed their faith and had been examined on their current understanding of it were admitted to the service to receive the sacrament.

This attraction to religion as a factor capable of helping form the finer feelings of the heart, and the opposite revulsion at certain attitudes and behaviour among some of those who claimed to practise it, is a recurrent feature in Burnss writing on the subject of religion and expressive of his own feelings and attitude to it.

In the pages that follow it will become clear that throughout his adult life Burns lived in the tension between having a very full appreciation of the value of religion, and feeling a revulsion at some of those who claimed to practise it, in that their irrational beliefs or inhumane conduct seemed at odds with all that he found good in it.

This underlying attitude which emerges most of all in his letters is perhaps best expressed in his verse epistle To the Reverend John McMath. In the poem, with which Burns had enclosed a copy of Holy Willies Prayer, religion is described as a maid divine, that is, as the servant of God in the service of mankind, and the poet asks for religions understanding lest his remarks about religious people be taken for criticism of her whose reputation is untouched:

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 neer defame thee.

Burns was introduced to religion in the most natural way possible, through the influence of his parents. William Burnes is obviously the model from which the somewhat idealized portrait of a father leading family worship in The Cotters Saturday Night is drawn. William Burnes was a member of the Church of Scotland and attended the Auld Kirk of Ayr to which the Parish of Alloway had been subjoined in 1690. His minister, Dr William Dalrymple, was called upon to baptise the infant Robert shortly after he was born. From his earliest days the young Burns would have been aware of the importance of religion to his parents.

In another sense, too, Burns came naturally to a religious viewpoint through what seems to have been an early appreciation of the feelings that are evoked as the imagination plays on the beauties, the mysteries, even the terrors of the natural world as it passes through the seasons. His fertile imagination, too, was stimulated by the marvellous range of human feelings as a life makes its way through the years yet is never quite able to fully understand the interior world that equally has its beauties, its mysteries, and its terrors. Burnss religion as it developed related in natural ways to the exterior and the interior worlds that are explored by the imagination.

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