Born at Southwark on 22 January 1828, he was a younger son of Jabez Burns, Baptist minister of New Church Street Chapel on Edgware Road, a temperance advocate from 1836.
In 1853, he helped Nathaniel Card, a Quaker, to found the United Kingdom Alliance in Manchester with a view to influencing the licensing laws.
On his father's death in 1876 he took over the pastorate of New Church Street Chapel, where he had assisted, but resigned it in 1881, to devote himself to temperance work.
Among Burns's numerous publications are: In a series of annual letters to The Times (1886–1909), on the ‘National Drink Bill', he cited facts and statistics.
Burns wrote memoirs of his wife and of his third son, Edward Spenser Burns (1861–1885), who died on 1 March 1885 at Leopoldville, Stanley Pool (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) on a mission for the International African Association in the Congo district, opening up a new route towards the Kouilou-Niari River,[1] and constructing charts.