The writer of the following pages learned years ago to reverence the memories of Burns and Dickens. Frequently hearing one or the other attacked from platform or pulpit, and believing both to
be great interpreters of the highest things taught by Christ, as the basis of the development of humanity towards the Divine, he resolved that some day he would try to help the world to
understand correctly the work of these two great men. His book, Dickens as an Educator, has helped to give a new conception of Dickens, as an educational pioneer and as a philosopher. The
purpose of this book is to show that Burns was well educated, and that both in his poems and in his letters he was an unsurpassed exponent of the highest human ideals yet expressed of
religion—democracy based on the value of the individual soul, brotherhood, love, and the philosophy of human life.