BUENS
BURT
Christian belief, and he was active among
the early Secularists. In his boyhood he
had been in a church choir, " but since
then John Burns has not often darkened
the door of a church," says Mr. Stead (Our
New Rulers, 1906, p. 39). Mr. Belfort Bax
(Reminiscences, p. 104) refers to his Secu
larist days. He passed to the Social
Democratic Society and became a leader
of the workers. In 1878 he was arrested
for a Socialist address on Clapham Common,
and in 1887 he was sent to prison for
enforcing the public right of meeting in
Trafalgar Square. Mr. Burns was the first
Labour member of the London County
Council, and he was M.P. for Battersea from
1892 to 1918. He was President of the Local
Government Board 1905-14, and President
of the Board of Trade for some months in
1914, resigning at the declaration of war.
Mr. Stead describes him as " an Agnostic "
(p. 8), and " an austere moralist who neither
drinks nor smokes, nor bets nor swears "
(p. 40).
BURNS, Robert, poet. B. Jan. 25, 1759. Ed. local school and at Ayr. Burns was put to surveying, but he turned to flax- dressing and later to farming. The bitter feud of the Calvinists and the " New Light " attracted his growing power of verse, and he wrote sharp satires on the older school. His first poem was the Two Herds (the rival schools of theology), 1785, which was soon followed by Holy Willie s Prayer and Holy Fair. The letters he wrote at the time confirm that he was now entirely sceptical about religion. In 1788 he returned to farming, and in 1789 he obtained a post in the Excise. In his later years he read the Bible much, and he occasionally addresses the Deity in his poems ; but such lines as
Thou Great Being ! what thou art Surpasses me to know
show that he remained more or less Agnostic. See A. Webster s Burns and the Kirk (1889). D. July 21, 1796.
BURROUGHS, John, Litt.D., American
129
naturalist. B. Apr. 3, 1837. Burroughs
taught in a school for eight years, and
then served as a clerk in the Treasury
(1864-73). Until 1884 he next acted as
national bank examiner, and for the
remainder of his life he lived on a farm,
dividing his time between letters and
gardening. He was admitted to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Besides a few early works on Whitman,
he has written a number of natural-history
works of great charm (Wake Robin, 1871,
etc.). He admired England his An October
Abroad is one of the most generous appre
ciations of England that an American ever
wrote and he counts M. Arnold, with
Whitman and Emerson, as one of his chief
guides. In later works, especially The
Light of Day (1900) and Time and Change
(1912), he rejects, not only Christianity,
but the belief in a personal God and per
sonal immortality. In the latter work he
speaks of the Christian Deity as the God
we have made ourselves out of our dreams
and fears and aspirations " (p. 179), and
declares that " man s religion is on the
wane, but his humanitarianism is a rising
tide " (p. 195). " There is, and can be,
nothing not inherent in Nature," he says
(p. 247).
BURT, the Right Honourable Thomas,
D.C.L., Labour leader. B. Nov. 12, 1837. Son of a miner, Burt got only two years of poor schooling, and at ten he began to work in the pit. He studied in his leisure, and in 1865 he became secretary of the Northumberland Miners Mutual Associa tion. He was M.P. for Morpeth from 1874 to 1918. He was for many years Presi dent of the Miners National Union, and was President of the Trades Union Con gress in 1891. From 1892 to 1895 he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. He became a Governor of the Imperial Institute in 1891, and was admitted to the Privy Council in 1906. In a sketch of his life Aaron Watson says that he passed from Methodism to " a rather detached interest in Unitarianism " 130 G
