ANENT A BAN

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 109, 1 February 1930, Page 29

ANENT A BAN

BURNS AND RELIGION

(By the Rev. D. Gardner Miller, in the “Otago Daily Times.’’)

Before I write « word about our erratic genius, Robert Burns, whose immortal memory will be honoured the world over to-day, I want to write something personal to all those who honour me by taking notice of my weekly article in this column. For nearly five years now I have peen receiving every other week, letters of appreciation from many to whom my scribbling has meant something. Of course I have also received letters of the other sort, but I have no grouch at anyone whose honest opinion differs from my own. Again and again I have been amazed at the number of lonely people who write and many a time I have thanked God that something I have written has cheered them. What perhaps has given me the greatest pleasure is to meet, face to face, npiny people from Otago who, when in Christchurch, take the trouble to meet me on a Sunday and introduce themselves by smilingly mentioning the “Otago Daily Times.” Now, for some time past, I have been requested by many to put some of my Saturday articles in a more permanent form. I was reluctant to do so, for I know how ephemeral newspaper articles are. I finally consented, however, and forwarded to a publishing house in Loudon a selection of articles to be published in book form. The little, volume is now being printed and copies are expected to arrive in New Zealand shortly. The general title is “The Gates of Pain,” and the book will be sold for half-a-crown.

Even an Englishman cannot withhold his praise of “Bobbie Burns.” (Lord, how I have suffered when listening to Londoners trying to quote Burns!), for our national poet has become the possession of all who live under the British flag. As with Shakespeare, so with Burns (especially among Scotsmen), his rhymes have become part of our common speech. One of the most graceful tributes ever paid to Burns was that of the celebrated American, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here is an excerpt from it: “The memory of Burns—l am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us anything to say. The west winds are murmuring it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the incoming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching always on the eaves of the stone chapel opposite ! may know something about it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his fame bright. The memory of Burns —every man’s and boy’s, and girl’s head carries snatches of his 'songs, and can say them by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them; nay the music-boxes of Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the handorgans of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind.” But I am more concerned at the moment to write of his attitude to religion—much as I should like to let my pen glide on and write of his chequered career and of his indomit-

able courage. Many people, unfortunately, know of Burns only by his biting, sarcastic, pungent allusions to the • Kirk of his day. They forget—or they don’t know—that these squibs of Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “The Holy Fair,” “The Ordination,” and “The Address to the Unco Guid,” were a sarcastic expression of the contempt which a real man had for the putty saluts of his village. Burns did more to explode the rigid Calvinism that seemed to delight in lurid pictures of the devil and hell and the damned, by laughing at the devil, than lihs been done since by learned theologians. Nobody could have any respect for a being when Burns dubbed him as “Clootie” or “Nickie Ben.” But there is another side—and the true one —to Burns’s attitude to religion. “God knows I’m no’ the thing I should be, Nor am I e’en the thing I could be, But twenty times I rayther would be An atheist clean, Than under Gospel colours hid be, Jist for a screen.” No honest man would, for one moment, do other than regret the stupidities and misdeeds of Burns. But no critic has been as candid as the poet, himself. “I acknowledge,” he says, "“l am too frequently the sport of caprice, whim, and passion.” In another epistle he declares: “God knows I am no saint. I have a whole host of follies and sins to answer for, but if I could —and I believe I do as far as I can—l would wipe away all tears from all eyes.” . The real Burns, revealing that deep, simple piety which is the birthright of every true Scot, is seen in that deeplymoving poem, “The Cottar’s Saturday Night.” There the poet uncovers.his soul. As one modern writer has said. “In ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night,’ as I kneel down on the clay floor with the peasant family, round the grey-haired priest of that fireside, I feel Burns on. his knees beside me, with his bonnet over his face; and I know that brave, big heart is sobbing sore for sins that saddened him, and made the hard world leave him to his death—sins that were often but the brimming over of a life too full and too exuberant for the frail cup of clay that carried it. There is the breath of God in the page whereon that picture lies! but first, undoubtedly, the soul had known it, which made the page a living thing of beauty and of pathos.” Take your New Testament in your hand and read the fifteenth chapter of Luke; then take‘your copy of Burns’s Poems and read “The Cottar’s Saturday Nijht.” Tell me—is there not something in that chapter in Luke that makes the “Prayer, of Burns in the Prospect of Death” something far more than a hope? “Where with Intention I have errd, No other plea I have, But Thou art good, and goodness still Delighteth to forgive.” And is there not something in “The Cottar’s Saturday night” that shows how our bard has sensed and gripped the utterly beautiful and simple spirit that lies at the head of the religion of Je'sus? “The heart aye’s the part aye

.That maks us.richt or wrang.”