Beyond a Soliloquy

 A century ago, Winnipeg’s Caledonian community, as the city’s newspapers called it, gathered to celebrate the birthday of the acclaimed poet Robert Burns. Like this year, the anniversary fell on a Sunday, but in those days, nobody would have considered holding a public celebratory dinner on the Lord’s Day, so it wasn’t until Tuesday that the community gathered at the Hotel Fort Garry to honour the poet. When I first read this, I thought the delay might be related to serving alcohol – what would a Burns night be without it – but while strict Prohibition had come to an end in 1921, it wasn’t until 1928 that public consumption was allowed, and, even then, it was some years before “mixed drinking” was allowed – that is, drinking with men and women in the same room. So the toasts in 1925 were made with juice, unless someone arrived at the hotel with their own flask.

The delay meant that Rev. Marion Shutter, minister of the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, had plenty of time to fulfill his obligations at church on Sunday, enjoy dinner with his family, and then make his way by train to Winnipeg, where he was the guest of honour and keynote speaker at the Burns night festivities. It wasn’t Shutter’s first visit to our city, and it wouldn’t be his last, for he was a popular public speaker. The business and social ties between Winnipeg and Minneapolis were stronger in those days than they are now, and rail transportation made travel between the cities easy and convenient, so when an out-of-town speaker was needed, those with a reputation for being eloquent and entertaining were often in demand. Beyond the walls of the church, it seems that Shutter most spoke to business organizations such as the retail lumberman’s association, which is dear to my heart as a former lumber retailer myself, and various bankers’ associations. While his lectures always spoke to the higher strivings of humankind, they weren’t so tainted with religion and morality that they spoiled the conviviality of a business luncheon.

Rev. Marion Shutter was considered an authority on Scottish literature, which is why he was invited to Winnipeg in 1925 to address the Caledonians at the Hotel Fort Garry. He didn’t disappoint his audience or the newspaper reporters on hand, who reported extensively on his speech in the next morning’s paper – beginning on the front page, no less.

Shutter intimated that Burns was the very epitome of a national poet, which naturally endeared him to the Scots as he sang to their hearts of their humble lives and grand traditions. So it comes as no surprise that his statue stands of the east grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building to honour our provinces Scottish community, just as Ukrainian poet Taras Schevchenko stands on the west. Some communities are represented by statespersons, others by explorers, but these two turned to their poets.

While Burns in Scotland, and elevated Scottish values and traditions, he was not for Scotland alone in Shutter’s estimation, but spoke of universal values in the human heart. “He touched the common humanity deeper than the foundations of Scotland’s hills and wider than the prairies of America,” said Shutter, inspiring North American poets such as Whittier and Emerson. “His poems are the property and solace of [hu]mankind.” They were characterized by sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy, coming from the heart and experience of a person who had known pleasure, grief, and remorse.

“There was a drop of his warm life blood in every word,” maintained Shutter. “And Burns was the poet of democracy. In his was seen the earnest, thoughtful reformer of religious and social social life; he was a man who hated all sham and hypocrisy, saw through all masks and stripped away all disguises. He assailed the wrongs of centuries, with the zeal of a patriot, and share and sang the new ideals rising on the night of darkness. … Never was there a more tender heart. His sympathy was for all things that had life and he had such a feeling of fun that he dispelled [people’s] fears so gaily that they joined in his laughter and forgot that they had been afraid.”

These observations of Marion Shutter have haunted me in recent days as the city where he preached the gospel of Universalism and human dignity finds itself under attack by unaccountable and uncontrolled forces driven by a cult of cruelty, nativism, xenophobia, and oppression. As shadows of authoritarianism and brutality descend on our neighbours, and the wrongs of centuries are enflamed by hypocrites hiding behind masks and disguises, it is the words of great poets like Burns, and countless others, that serve to help us forget we are afraid and find whatever reserves of laughter we may still tap.

Marion Shutter was hardly the first Universalist of Unitarian minister to address the “Immortal Memory,” as toasts to Burns are called. On the centenary of Burns’ birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to address the celebration held in his honour at Boston. He praised him, declaring that, “Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the mind of men to-day that great uprising of the middle class against the armed and privileged minorities, that uprising which worked politically in the American and French Revolutions, and which, not in governments so much as in education and social order, has changed the face of the world.” 

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, on this day in 1759, the oldest of seven children and grew up in a thatched house working on his parents’ farm, although he later became a civil servant. William Burness, his father, was “a moderately well-educated farmer who did some of the teaching of his children and occasionally provided private tutors.” William prepared a “relatively liberal catechism for his children as an alternative to that of the Westminster Assembly,” while Robert read widely, including works by the philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith.  He wrote his first poem at the age of 15 – a love poem, as it happens.

At 21, he founded the Tarbolton Bachelor’s Club, the constitution of which demanded that its members have “a frank, honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean.” The club debated questions like whether or not “we derive more happiness from love or friendship” and whether or not people in so-called primitive societies were happier than “the peasant of a civilised society.” 

If Robert Burns had lived in the era of social media, his relationships with both women and religion would have undoubtedly read, “it’s complicated.” In addressing religious matters, as with other topics, Burns employed “satire as his weapon,” forgoing complicated doctrines and embracing ideas that were essentially simple and sympathetic.

“Shall I write you on politics or religion, two master-subjects for your sayers of nothing?” asked Robert Burns in a letter to Provost Maxwell. “Of the first I daresay by this time you are nearly surfeited; and for the last, whenever they may talk of it who make it a kind of company concern, I never could endure it beyond a soliloquy.” He had more than a passing interest in religious questions and was counted among Scotland’s religious liberals of his era, favouring its heresies over its orthodoxies.

Notwithstanding the fact that, today, Burns is celebrated by Presbyterian divines the world over, whatever else he may have been, Robert Burns was a heretic, pure and simple, whose heterodox views alarmed the leaders of the established church in Scotland.

“Not Latimer, not Luther struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer,” opined Emerson. “The Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the French Rights of Man, and the Marseillaise, are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns.” And this is no doubt why he was quoted extensively throughout the labour movement in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. It’s no wonder that his poems were always on the lips of Tommy Douglas and J.S. Woodsworth, Stanley Knowles and more recently Bill Blaikie.

As a young man, Burns studied religion and read liberal theological works, such as John Taylor’s 1740 discourse on The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin. He admired two local ministers, William McGill and William Dalrymple, who held liberal views on both the Trinity and salvation, and he appears to have been familiar with the teachings of English Unitarians Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey. He was sometimes referred to as “Rab the Ranter,” and he inflicted his heretical religious views on his neighbours, some of whom shunned him as a result.

In his writing, he mocked Calvinists, both ministers and laypeople who sought to impose Calvinist dogma and morality on those around them. In “The Ordination” he lampoons Old Light churchmen, while his satirical poem “Epistle to John Goldie” ridicules the bigoted and superstitious, and “The Holy Fair” mocks outdoor revivals. 

It is his poem “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” though, that reveals his Universalism and surely endeared him to Marion Shutter:

O Thou, that in the heavens does dwell, 

Who, as it pleases best Thyself, 

Sends one to heaven and ten to hell, 

        All for Thy glory, 

And not for any good or ill

        They’ve done before Thee! 

 

O Thou, that in the heavens does dwell, 

Wha, as it pleases best Thysel', 

Sends ane to heaven an' ten to hell, 

        A' for Thy glory, 

And no for onie guid or ill 

        They've done afore Thee!

This was a frank criticism of the God that his neighbours worshipped, and, as a consequence, his words were viewed as scandalous. Oh, we sing his love poems, and on New Year’s Day, we gather round and sing “Auld Lang Syne,” but some of his poems only survive today because they were recorded in books, not because they were necessarily popular.

And in his satirical poem, “The Kirk’s Alarm,” Burns revealed his sympathy for the Arians, or Unitarians, of his day. It is a long poem – a very long poem – so I can only quote a few verses to give you a sense of its flavour:

Orthodox! orthodox, who believe in John Knox, 

Let me sound an alarm to your conscience: 

A heretic blast has been blown in the West, 

"That what is no sense must be nonsense," 

Orthodox! That what is no sense must be nonsense.

Doctor Mac! Doctor Mac, you should streek on a rack, 

To strike evil-doers wi' terror: 

To join Faith and Sense, upon any pretence, 

Was heretic, damnable error, 

Doctor Mac!  ‘Twas heretic, damnable error. …

D'rymple mild! D'rymple mild, tho' your heart's like a child, 

And your life like the new-driven snaw, 

Yet that winna save you, auld Satan must have you, 

For preaching that three's ane an' twa, 

D'rymple mild! For preaching that three's ane an' twa. 

The poem goes on for 18 verses, eviscerating the orthodox preachers and nodding with an approving wink to the liberal ones. For today, suffice it to say that Burns saw God as an “object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration” and believed that the divine promise – that is, the hope for salvation – extended to everyone, not an elect few, while he esteemed Jesus as, in his words, a “great personage.” God is "almighty, and all bounteous" and Jesus Christ, “a great Personage.”

From the liberal catechism he learned at his father’s knee to the end of his days, Robert Burns advocated for a religion that was down to earth, rational yet romantic, and grounded in the human experience. He emphasized sincerity and feeling – an internal, emotional, and rational experience – as the basis of religion. He believed in a benevolent. a benevolent deity who created happy, equal beings. His religion was grounded in nature and immorality. Even though Burns’s own morality was clearly unconventional and controversial, he believed that personal struggle was a part of the religious experience, and that we could never grow deeply without it. He was critical of the priesthood in all of its forms, even after it had supposedly been reformed.

Burns celebrated the passions as a gift from God and believed that pleasure was not a sin. He denied original sin, declaring to Frances Dunlop, “I believe in my conscience that the case is just quite contrary. We came into this world with a heart and disposition to do good for it …”  And he rejected those theologies which seemed to be merely tools of clerical power, robbing life of its emotional vitality and satisfaction. This is the Burns you will not hear about at a Burns Night dinner. This is the Burns who would still scandalize most of the people who attend them. This is the Robert Burns that makes him our kindred spirit in religion.

In the end, it is the quality of our lives that matters most. In one of his letters to Clarinda, he wrote: “My definition of worth is short: truth and humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the presence of ... my Creator.”  That was enough faith for Robert Burns, and, quite honestly, it’s more than enough for me.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg on Robert Burns Day.

Works Cited

Marion Shutter, Burns Night Address as reported in The Winnipeg Tribune (Wednesday, January 28, 1925).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Robert Burns,” a speech at the celebration of the Burns centenary, Boston (January 25, 1859).

Peter Hughes and Andrew Hill, “Robert Burns,” in Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, 2001.

Peter Esslemont, Brithers A' Robert Burns, 1959.