Chapter XXXI Burton’s Religion

145.  Burton’s Religion.

As regards religion, Burton had in early life, as we have seen, leaned to Sufism; and this faith influenced him to the end.  For a little while he coquetted with Roman Catholicism; but the journey to Mecca practically turned him into a Mohammedan.  At the time of his marriage he called himself an agnostic, and, as we have seen, he was always something of a spiritualist.  Lady Burton, charmingly mixing her metaphors,[FN#521] says “he examined every religion, and picked out its pear to practise it.”  The state of his mind in 1880 is revealed by his Kasidah.  From that time to his death he was half Mohammedan and half Agnostic.  His wife pressed him in season and out of season to become a Catholic, and, as we shall see, he did at last so far succumb to her importunities as to sign a paper in which, to use Lady Burton’s expression, “he abjured the Protestant heresy,” and put himself in line with the Catholics.[FN#522] But, as his opinions do not seem to have changed one iota, this “profession of faith” could have had little actual value.  He listened to the prayers that his wife said with him every night, and he distinctly approved of religion in other persons.  Thus, he praised the Princess of Wales[FN#523] for hearing her children say their “little prayers,"[FN#524] every night at her knee, and he is credited with the remark:  “A man without religion may be excused, but a woman without religion is unthinkable.”  Priests, ceremonials, services, all seemed to him only tinkling cymbals.  He was always girding at “scapularies and other sacred things.”  He delighted to compare Romanism unfavourably with Mohammedanism.  Thus he would say sarcastically, “Moslems, like Catholics, pray for the dead; but as they do the praying themselves instead of paying a priest to do it, their prayers, of course, are of no avail.”  He also objected to the Church of Rome because, to use his own words, “it has added a fourth person to the Trinity."[FN#525] He said he found “four great Protestant Sommites:  (1) St. Paul, who protested against St. Peter’s Hebraism; (2) Mohammed, who protested against the perversions of Christianity; (3) Luthur, who protested against the rule of the Pope; (4) Sir Richard Burton, who protested against the whole business.”  The way in which he used to ridicule the Papal religion in his wife’s presence often jarred on his friends, who thought that however much he might disapprove of it, he ought, for her sake, to have restrained his tongue.  But he did not spare other religious bodies either.  He wanted to know, for instance, what the clergy of the Church of England did for the (pounds)3,500,000 a year “wasted on them,” while he summed up the Nonconformists in the scornful phrase:  “Exeter Hall!” He considered anthropomorphism to explain satisfactorily not only the swan maiden, and the other feathered ladies[FN#526]