Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than
the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what
is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most
easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that
Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will
pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as
wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given
piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find
it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial
knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high
reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra
only in what is purely theoretic; let him be stringent on predestination,
but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity
of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of
Time; ardent and imaginative on the pro-millennial advent of Christ, but
cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the _status quo_.
Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but
with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal
in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of
unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures
presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth
century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into
impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let
him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the
Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the
accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter
of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political
events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual
by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for
their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they
may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom
they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the
“unclean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong
cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the
name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the
avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he
has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold,
and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who
will regard as a sort of pious “light reading” the demonstration that the
prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the
fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his
standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the
Revelations.
Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of
Sunday! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of
working-day interests and lay splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes
the cynosure of a thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the
Amphitryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church
or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public speakers.
The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans.
Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort of counsel for the
defendant. The honorable gentleman on one side of the House is liable to
have his facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the
opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull
or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience quietly slip out
one by one. But the preacher is completely master of the situation: no
one may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary
conversations, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of
his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may
riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict him;
he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative
experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the
inconvenient facts omitted:—all this he may do with impunity, certain
that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing are not listening.
For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and
chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to
make a “feature” in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most
irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that
they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are
often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open
to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat
them with thorough freedom of speech and pen.
It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching desirable for
the public good that we devote some pages to Dr. Cumming. He is, as
every one knows, a preacher of immense popularity, and of the numerous
publications in which he perpetuates his pulpit labors, all circulate
widely, and some, according to their title-page, have reached the
sixteenth thousand. Now our opinion of these publications is the very
opposite of that given by a newspaper eulogist: we do _not_ “believe that
the repeated issues of Dr. Cumming’s thoughts are having a beneficial
effect on society,” but the reverse; and hence, little inclined as we are
to dwell on his pages, we think it worth while to do so, for the sake of
pointing out in them what we believe to be profoundly mistaken and
pernicious. Of Dr. Cumming personally we know absolutely nothing: our
acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works, our judgment
of him is founded solely on the manner in which he has written himself
down on his pages. We know neither how he looks nor how he lives. We
are ignorant whether, like St. Paul, he has a bodily presence that is
weak and contemptible, or whether his person is as florid and as prone to
amplification as his style. For aught we know, he may not only have the
gift of prophecy, but may bestow the profits of all his works to feed the
poor, and be ready to give his own body to be burned with as much
alacrity as he infers the everlasting burning of Roman Catholics and
Puseyites. Out of the pulpit he may be a model of justice, truthfulness,
and the love that thinketh no evil; but we are obliged to judge of his
charity by the spirit we find in his sermons, and shall only be glad to
learn that his practice is, in many respects, an amiable _non sequitur_
from his teaching.
Dr. Cumming’s mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not
the slightest leaning toward mysticism in his Christianity—no indication
of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the
Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of Justification, and
dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists
on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved
to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous,
necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine love. He is at home in
the external, the polemical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is
only episodically devout and practical. The great majority of his
published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against
Romanists and unbelievers, with “vindications” of the Bible, with the
political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events;
and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is
tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the
end. He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he
is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with
satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an
“infidel;” it is a favorite exercise with him to form conjectures of the
process by which the earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr.
Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air,
while Romanists, Puseyites, and infidels are given over to gnashing of
teeth. But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death
of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of
sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus
weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, “Father, forgive
them,” of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which
passeth understanding—of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming’s
discourses.
His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of mind. Though
diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it has rapidity of movement,
perfect clearness, and some aptness of illustration. He has much of that
literary talent which makes a good journalist—the power of beating out an
idea over a large space, and of introducing far-fetched _à propos_. His
writings have, indeed, no high merit: they have no originality or force
of thought, no striking felicity of presentation, no depth of emotion.
Throughout nine volumes we have alighted on no passage which impressed us
as worth extracting, and placing among the “beauties,” of evangelical
writers, such as Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, or Isaac Taylor.
Everywhere there is commonplace cleverness, nowhere a spark of rare
thought, of lofty sentiment, or pathetic tenderness. We feel ourselves
in company with a voluble retail talker, whose language is exuberant but
not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise
information or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument
continually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in
his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells
us (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 265) that “Botany weaves around the cross her
amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home—Linnæus from
his flowery resting-place—and Werner and Hutton from their subterranean
graves at the voice of Chalmers, to acknowledge that all they learned and
elicited in their respective provinces has only served to show more
clearly that Jesus of Nazareth is enthroned on the riches of the
universe:”—and so prosaic an injunction to his hearers as that they
should choose a residence within an easy distance of church, is
magnificently draped by him as an exhortation to prefer a house “that
basks in the sunshine of the countenance of God.” Like all preachers of
his class, he is more fertile in imaginative paraphrase than in close
exposition, and in this way he gives us some remarkable fragments of what
we may call the romance of Scripture, filling up the outline of the
record with an elaborate coloring quite undreamed of by more literal
minds. The serpent, he informs us, said to Eve, “Can it be so? Surely
you are mistaken, that God hath said you shall die, a creature so fair,
so lovely, so beautiful. It is impossible. _The laws of nature and
physical science tell you that my interpretation is correct_; you shall
not die. I can tell you by my own experience as an angel that you shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 294.) Again,
according to Dr. Cumming, Abel had so clear an idea of the Incarnation
and Atonement, that when he offered his sacrifice “he must have said, ‘I
feel myself a guilty sinner, and that in myself I cannot meet thee alive;
I lay on thine altar this victim, and I shed its blood as my testimony
that mine should be shed; and I look for forgiveness and undeserved mercy
through him who is to bruise the serpent’s head, and whose atonement this
typifies.’” (“Occas. Disc.” vol. i. p. 23.) Indeed, his productions are
essentially ephemeral; he is essentially a journalist, who writes sermons
instead of leading articles, who, instead of venting diatribes against
her Majesty’s Ministers, directs his power of invective against Cardinal
Wiseman and the Puseyites; instead of declaiming on public spirit,
perorates on the “glory of God.” We fancy he is called, in the more
refined evangelical circles, an “intellectual preacher;” by the plainer
sort of Christians, a “flowery preacher;” and we are inclined to think
that the more spiritually minded class of believers, who look with
greater anxiety for the kingdom of God within them than for the visible
advent of Christ in 1864, will be likely to find Dr. Cumming’s
declamatory flights and historico-prophetical exercitations as little
better than “clouts o’ cauld parritch.”
Such is our general impression from his writings after an attentive
perusal. There are some particular characteristics which we shall
consider more closely, but in doing so we must be understood as
altogether declining any doctrinal discussion. We have no intention to
consider the grounds of Dr. Cumming’s dogmatic system, to examine the
principles of his prophetic exegesis, or to question his opinion
concerning the little horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. We
identify ourselves with no one of the bodies whom he regards it as his
special mission to attack: we give our adhesion neither to Romanism,
Puseyism, nor to that anomalous combination of opinions which he
introduces to us under the name of infidelity. It is simply as
spectators that we criticise Dr. Cumming’s mode of warfare, and we
concern ourselves less with what he holds to be Christian truth than with
his manner of enforcing that truth, less with the doctrines he teaches
than with the moral spirit and tendencies of his teaching.
One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Cumming’s writings is
_unscrupulosity of statement_. His motto apparently is,
_Christianitatem_, _quocunque modo_, _Christianitatem_; and the only
system he includes under the term Christianity is Calvinistic
Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that the human brain is a
congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs that we do not pause to inquire
how Dr. Cumming, who attributes the conversion of the unbelieving to the
Divine Spirit, can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by
argumentative white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the genuineness
of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his conviction that the
doctrines he preaches are necessary to salvation; on the contrary, we
regard the flagrant unveracity that we find on his pages as an indirect
result of that conviction—as a result, namely, of the intellectual and
moral distortion of view which is inevitably produced by assigning to
dogmas, based on a very complex structure of evidence, the place and
authority of first truths. A distinct appreciation of the value of
evidence—in other words, the intellectual perception of truth—is more
closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of
veracity, than is generally admitted. There is not a more pernicious
fallacy afloat, in common parlance, than the wide distinction made
between intellect and morality. Amiable impulses without intellect, man
may have in common with dogs and horses; but morality, which is
specifically human, is dependent on the regulation of feeling by
intellect. All human beings who can be said to be in any degree moral
have their impulses guided, not indeed always by their own intellect, but
by the intellect of human beings who have gone before them, and created
traditions and associations which have taken the rank of laws. Now that
highest moral habit, the constant preference of truth, both theoretically
and practically, pre-eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect
with the impulses, as is indicated by the fact that it is only found in
anything like completeness in the highest class of minds. In accordance
with this we think it is found that, in proportion as religious sects
exalt feeling above intellect, and believe themselves to be guided by
direct inspiration rather than by a spontaneous exertion of their
faculties—that is, in proportion as they are removed from
rationalism—their sense of truthfulness is misty and confused. No one
can have talked to the more enthusiastic Methodists and listened to their
stories of miracles without perceiving that they require no other
passport to a statement than that it accords with their wishes and their
general conception of God’s dealings; nay, they regard as a symptom of
sinful scepticism an inquiry into the evidence for a story which they
think unquestionably tends to the glory of God, and in retailing such
stories, new particulars, further tending to his glory, are “borne in”
upon their minds. Now, Dr. Cumming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic
pietist: within a certain circle—within the mill of evangelical
orthodoxy—his intellect is perpetually at work; but that principle of
sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from the
predominance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the
doctrine of verbal inspiration; what is for them a state of emotion
submerging the intellect, is with him a formula imprisoning the
intellect, depriving it of its proper function—the free search for
truth—and making it the mere servant-of-all-work to a foregone
conclusion. Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning
a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether
it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts, as such, but for
facts that will bear out their doctrine. They become accustomed to
reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where
adverse evidence reaches demonstration they must resort to devices and
expedients in order to explain away contradiction. It is easy to see
that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the
sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into
fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.
We have entered into this digression for the sake of mitigating the
inference that is likely to be drawn from that characteristic of Dr.
Cumming’s works to which we have pointed. He is much in the same
intellectual condition as that professor of Padua; who, in order to
disprove Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites, urged that as there
were only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets—a
mental condition scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well
suppose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets, and
no more, to be a necessary condition of salvation, his mental condition
would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through
Galileo’s telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his
inward alarms rather than with the external fact. So long as a belief in
propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of
truth _as such_ is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man
who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the
storm which threatens to overwhelm him. The sense of alarm and haste,
the anxiety for personal safety, which Dr. Cumming insists upon as the
proper religious attitude, unmans the nature, and allows no thorough,
calm thinking no truly noble, disinterested feeling. Hence, we by no
means suspect that the unscrupulosity of statement with which we charge
Dr. Cumming, extends beyond the sphere of his theological prejudices; we
do not doubt that, religion apart, he appreciates and practices veracity.
A grave general accusation must be supported by details, and in adducing
those we purposely select the most obvious cases of
misrepresentation—such as require no argument to expose them, but can be
perceived at a glance. Among Dr. Cumming’s numerous books, one of the
most notable for unscrupulosity of statement is the “Manual of Christian
Evidences,” written, as he tells us in his Preface, not to give the
deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, but to furnish
Scripture Readers, City Missionaries, and Sunday School Teachers, with a
“ready reply” to sceptical arguments. This announcement that _readiness_
was the chief quality sought for in the solutions here given, modifies
our inference from the other qualities which those solutions present; and
it is but fair to presume that when the Christian disputant is not in a
hurry Dr. Cumming would recommend replies less ready and more veracious.
Here is an example of what in another place {74} he tells his readers is
“change in their pocket . . . a little ready argument which they can
employ, and therewith answer a fool according to his folly.” From the
nature of this argumentative small coin, we are inclined to think Dr.
Cumming understands answering a fool according to his folly to mean,
giving him a foolish answer. We quote from the “Manual of Christian
Evidences,” p. 62.
“Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the
greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief;
and because he was an expert thief he was enrolled among the gods.
Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard, and therefore he was
enrolled among the gods. Venus was a dissipated and abandoned
courtesan, and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses. Mars
was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood, and therefore he
was deified and enrolled among the gods.”
Does Dr. Cumming believe the purport of these sentences? If so, this
passage is worth handing down as his theory of the Greek myth—as a
specimen of the astounding ignorance which was possible in a metropolitan
preacher, A.D. 1854. And if he does not believe them . . . The inference
must then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks
is not a Christian virtue, but only a “splendid sin” of the unregenerate.
This inference is rendered the more probable by our finding, a little
further on, that he is not more scrupulous about the moderns, if they
come under his definition of “Infidels.” But the passage we are about to
quote in proof of this has a worse quality than its discrepancy with
fact. Who that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the
presence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on the
thought that Lord Byron’s unhappy career was ennobled and purified toward
its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and energetic
efforts for his fellow-men? Who has not read with deep emotion those
last pathetic lines, beautiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love
and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism? Who
has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi—the
sufferer’s inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible,
and the last long hours of silent pain? Yet for the sake of furnishing
his disciples with a “ready reply,” Dr. Cumming can prevail on himself to
inoculate them with a bad-spirited falsity like the following:
“We have one striking exhibition of _an infidel’s brightest
thoughts_, in some lines _written in his dying moments_ by a man,
gifted with great genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess,
but of worthless principle, and yet more worthless practices—I mean
the celebrated Lord Byron. He says:
“‘Though gay companions o’er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill,
Though pleasure fills the maddening soul,
The heart—_the heart_ is lonely still.
“‘Ay, but to die, and go, alas!
Where all have gone and all must go;
To be the _Nothing_ that I was,
Ere born to life and living woe!
“‘Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
Tis _something better_ not to be.
“‘Nay, for myself, so dark my fate
Through every turn of life hath been,
_Man_ and the _world_ so much _I hate_,
I care not when I quit the scene.’”
It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Cumming can have been so grossly
imposed upon—that he can be so ill-informed as really to believe that
these lines were “written” by Lord Byron in his dying moments; but,
allowing him the full benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain
his introduction of this feebly rabid doggrel as “an infidel’s brightest
thoughts?”
In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Cumming directs most of
his arguments against opinions that are either totally imaginary, or that
belong to the past rather than to the present, while he entirely fails to
meet the difficulties actually felt and urged by those who are unable to
accept Revelation. There can hardly be a stronger proof of misconception
as to the character of free-thinking in the present day, than the
recommendation of Leland’s “Short and Easy Method with the Deists”—a
method which is unquestionably short and easy for preachers disinclined
to reconsider their stereotyped modes of thinking and arguing, but which
has quite ceased to realize those epithets in the conversion of Deists.
Yet Dr. Cumming not only recommends this book, but takes the trouble
himself to write a feebler version of its arguments. For example, on the
question of the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testament
writing’s, he says: “If, therefore, at a period long subsequent to the
death of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn up a
book which they christened by the name of the Holy Scripture, and
recorded these things which appear in it as facts when they were only the
fancies of their own imagination, surely the _Jews_ would have instantly
reclaimed that no such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus
Christ appeared in their capital, and that _their_ crucifixion of Him,
and their alleged evil treatment of his apostles, were mere fictions.”
{76} It is scarcely necessary to say that, in such argument as this, Dr.
Cumming is beating the air. He is meeting a hypothesis which no one
holds, and totally missing the real question. The only type of “infidel”
whose existence Dr. Cumming recognizes is that fossil personage who
“calls the Bible a lie and a forgery.” He seems to be ignorant—or he
chooses to ignore the fact—that there is a large body of eminently
instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the
rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men,
who are not historical critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the
letter of the Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions.
Dr. Cumming’s infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to
convince himself that there is no God, and that Christianity is an
imposture, but who is all the while secretly conscious that he is
opposing the truth, and cannot help “letting out” admissions “that the
Bible is the Book of God.” We are favored with the following “Creed of
the Infidel:”
“I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is
matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I
believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made
itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever.
I believe that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that
the body is the soul; and that after death there is neither body nor
soul. I believe there is no religion, that _natural religion is the
only religion_, _and all religion unnatural_. I believe not in
Moses; I believe in the first philosophers. I believe not in the
evangelists; I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes.
I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I
believe not in revelation; _I believe in tradition_; _I believe in
the Talmud_; _I believe in the Koran_; I believe not in the Bible. I
believe in Socrates; I believe in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I
believe not in Christ. And lastly, _I believe_ in all unbelief.”
The intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this complex web of
contradictions, is, moreover, according to Dr. Cumming, a being who
unites much simplicity and imbecility with his Satanic hardihood—much
tenderness of conscience with his obdurate vice. Hear the “proof:”
“I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel, with whom I
reasoned day after day, and for hours together; I submitted to him
the internal, the external, and the experimental evidences, but made
no impression on his scorn and unbelief. At length I entertained a
suspicion that there was something morally, rather than
intellectually wrong, and that the bias was not in the intellect, but
in the heart; one day therefore I said to him, ‘I must now state my
conviction, and you may call me uncharitable, but duty compels me;
you are living in some known and gross sin.’ _The man’s countenance
became pale_; _he bowed and left me_.”—“Man. of Evidences,” p. 254.
Here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon of an “acute and
enlightened” man who, deliberately purposing to indulge in a favorite
sin, and regarding the Gospel with scorn and unbelief, is, nevertheless,
so much more scrupulous than the majority of Christians, that he cannot
“embrace sin and the Gospel simultaneously;” who is so alarmed at the
Gospel in which he does not believe, that he cannot be easy without
trying to crush it; whose acuteness and enlightenment suggest to him, as
a means of crushing the Gospel, to argue from day to day with Dr.
Cumming; and who is withal so naïve that he is taken by surprise when Dr.
Cumming, failing in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender in
conscience that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and leaves the
spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of holding Dr.
Cumming’s “Creed of the Infidel,” of at the same time believing in
tradition and “believing in all unbelief,” it must be the mind of the
infidel just described, for whose existence we have Dr. Cumming’s _ex
officio_ word as a theologian; and to theologians we may apply what
Sancho Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell
lies—except when it suits their purpose.
The total absence from Dr. Cumming’s theological mind of any demarcation
between fact and rhetoric is exhibited in another passage, where he
adopts the dramatic form:
“Ask the peasant on the hills—and _I have asked amid the mountains of
Braemar and Deeside_—‘How do you know that this book is divine, and
that the religion you profess is true? You never read Paley?’ ‘No,
I never heard of him.’—‘You have never read Butler?’ ‘No, I have
never heard of him.’—‘Nor Chalmers?’ ‘No, I do not know him.’—‘You
have never read any books on evidence?’ ‘No, I have read no such
books.’—‘Then, how do you know this book is true?’ ‘Know it! Tell
me that the Dee, the Clunie, and the Garrawalt, the streams at my
feet, do not run; that the winds do not sigh amid the gorges of these
blue hills; that the sun does not kindle the peaks of Loch-na-Gar;
tell me my heart does not beat, and I will believe you; but do not
tell me the Bible is not divine. I have found its truth illuminating
my footsteps; its consolations sustaining my heart. May my tongue
cleave to my mouth’s roof and my right hand forget its cunning, if I
every deny what is my deepest inner experience, that this blessed
book is the book of God.’”—“Church Before the Flood,” p. 35.
Dr. Cumming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presentation that we
find it impossible to gather whether he means to assert that this is what
a peasant on the mountains of Braemar _did_ say, or that it is what such
a peasant _would_ say: in the one case, the passage may be taken as a
measure of his truthfulness; in the other, of his judgment.
His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intuitive, like that
of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 405)
that he has himself experienced what it is to have religious doubts. “I
was tainted while at the University by this spirit of scepticism. I
thought Christianity might not be true. The very possibility of its
being true was the thought I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience
could give me no peace till I had settled it. I read, and I read from
that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I am as
convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book is the book of God
as that I now address you.” This experience, however, instead of
impressing on him the fact that doubt may be the stamp of a truth-loving
mind—that _sunt quibus non credidisse honor est_, _et fidei futuræ
pignus_—seems to have produced precisely the contrary effect. It has not
enabled him even to conceive the condition of a mind “perplext in faith
but pure in deeds,” craving light, yearning for a faith that will
harmonize and cherish its highest powers and aspirations, but unable to
find that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His own doubts apparently were
of a different kind. Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble,
candid, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by
an ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is hardened,
conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light—a fool who is to be
answered according to his folly—that is, with ready replies made up of
reckless assertions, of apocryphal anecdotes, and, where other resources
fail, of vituperative imputation. As to the reading which he has
prosecuted for fifteen years—_either_ it has left him totally ignorant of
the relation which his own religions creed bears to the criticism and
philosophy of the nineteenth century, or he systematically blinks that
criticism and that philosophy; and instead of honestly and seriously
endeavoring to meet and solve what he knows to be the real difficulties,
contents himself with setting up popinjays to shoot at, for the sake of
confirming the ignorance and winning the heap admiration of his
evangelical hearers and readers. Like the Catholic preacher who, after
throwing down his cap and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned to his
audience and said, “You see this heretical fellow has not a word to say
for himself,” Dr. Cumming, having drawn his ugly portrait of the infidel,
and put arguments of a convenient quality into his mouth, finds a “short
and easy method” of confounding this “croaking frog.”
In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a mental process
which may be expressed in the following syllogism: Whatever tends to the
glory of God is true; it is for the glory of God that infidels should be
as bad as possible; therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are
as bad as possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of
“gross and licentious lives.” Is there not some well-known unbeliever,
David Hume, for example, of whom even Dr. Cumming’s readers may have
heard as an exception? No matter. Some one suspected that he was _not_
an exception, and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one
for a Christian to entertain. (See “Man. of Ev.,” p. 73.)—If we were
unable to imagine this kind of self-sophistication, we should be obliged
to suppose that, relying on the ignorance of his evangelical disciples,
he fed them with direct and conscious falsehoods. “Voltaire,” he informs
them, “declares there is no God;” he was “an antitheist, that is one who
deliberately and avowedly opposed and hated God; who swore in his
blasphemy that he would dethrone him;” and “advocated the very depths of
the lowest sensuality.” With regard to many statements of a similar
kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming’s volumes, we
presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand
character of his acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An
evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well-read. Here, however, is a
case which the extremest supposition of educated ignorance will not
reach. Even books of “evidences” quote from Voltaire the line—
“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer;”
even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of literature must know
that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist—must know that he
wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he
believed to be a false God—must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist
on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary
monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the
throne. That Dr. Cumming should repeat the vulgar fables about
Voltaire’s death is merely what we might expect from the specimens we
have seen of his illustrative stories. A man whose accounts of his own
experience are apocryphal is not likely to put borrowed narratives to any
severe test.
The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is strikingly
typified by the way in which he alternates from the unveracious to the
absurd, from misrepresentation to contradiction. Side by side with the
abduction of “facts” such as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on
one page that the Trinity was too grand a doctrine to have been conceived
by man, and was _therefore_ Divine; and on another page, that the
Incarnation _had_ been preconceived by man, and is _therefore_ to be
accepted as Divine. But we are less concerned with the fallacy of his
“ready replies” than with their falsity; and even of this we can only
afford space for a very few specimens. Here is one: “There is a
_thousand times_ more proof that the gospel of John was written by him
than there is that the _Αναβασις_ was written by Xenophon, or the Ars
Poetica by Horace.” If Dr. Cumming had chosen Plato’s Epistles or
Anacreon’s Poems instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, he would
have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would have furnished a
ready reply which would have been equally effective with his
Sunday-school teachers and their disputants. Hence we conclude this
prodigality of misstatement, this exuberance of mendacity, is an
effervescence of zeal _in majorem gloriam Dei_. Elsewhere he tells us
that “the idea of the author of the ‘Vestiges’ is, that man is the
development of a monkey, that the monkey is the embryo man, so that _if
you keep a baboon long enough_, _it will develop itself into a man_.”
How well Dr. Cumming has qualified himself to judge of the ideas in “that
very unphilosophical book,” as he pronounces it, may be inferred from the
fact that he implies the author of the “Vestiges” to have _originated_
the nebular hypothesis.
In the volume from which the last extract is taken, even the hardihood of
assertion is surpassed by the suicidal character of the argument. It is
called “The Church before the Flood,” and is devoted chiefly to the
adjustment of the question between the Bible and Geology. Keeping within
the limits we have prescribed to ourselves, we do not enter into the
matter of this discussion; we merely pause a little over the volume in
order to point out Dr. Cumming’s mode of treating the question. He first
tells us that “the Bible has not a single scientific error in it;” that
“_its slightest intimations of scientific principles or natural phenomena
have in every instance been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly
true_,” and he asks:
“How is it that Moses, with no greater education than the Hindoo or
the ancient philosopher, has written his book, touching science at a
thousand points, so accurately that scientific research has
discovered no flaws in it; and yet in those investigations which have
taken place in more recent centuries, it has not been shown that he
has committed one single error, or made one solitary assertion which
can be proved by the maturest science, or by the most eagle-eyed
philosopher, to be incorrect, scientifically or historically?”
According to this the relation of the Bible to science should be one of
the strong points of apologists for revelation: the scientific accuracy
of Moses should stand at the head of their evidences; and they might urge
with some cogency, that since Aristotle, who devoted himself to science,
and lived many ages after Moses, does little else than err ingeniously,
this fact, that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touching science at a
thousand points, has written nothing that has not been “demonstrated to
be exactly and strictly true,” is an irrefragable proof of his having
derived his knowledge from a supernatural source. How does it happen,
then, that Dr. Cumming forsakes this strong position? How is it that we
find him, some pages further on, engaged in reconciling Genesis with the
discoveries of science, by means of imaginative hypotheses and feats of
“interpretation?” Surely, that which has been demonstrated to be exactly
and strictly true does not require hypothesis and critical argument, in
order to show that it may _possibly_ agree with those very discoveries by
means of which its exact and strict truth has been demonstrated. And why
should Dr. Cumming suppose, as we shall presently find him supposing,
that men of science hesitate to accept the Bible, because it appears to
contradict their discoveries? By his own statement, that appearance of
contradiction does not exist; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated
that the Bible precisely agrees with their discoveries. Perhaps,
however, in saying of the Bible that its “slightest intimations of
scientific principles or natural phenomena have in every instance been
demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true,” Dr. Cumming merely means
to imply that theologians have found out a way of explaining the biblical
text so that it no longer, in their opinion, appears to be in
contradiction with the discoveries of science. One of two things,
therefore: either he uses language without the slightest appreciation of
its real meaning, or the assertions he makes on one page are directly
contradicted by the arguments he urges on another.
Dr. Cumming’s principles—or, we should rather say, confused notions—of
biblical interpretation, as exhibited in this volume, are particularly
significant of his mental calibre. He says (“Church before the Flood,”
p. 93): “Men of science, who are full of scientific investigation and
enamored of scientific discovery, will hesitate before they accept a book
which, they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal
disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth, or among the stars
of the sky. To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, there
is not the least dissonance between God’s written book and the most
mature discoveries of geological science. One thing, however, there may
be: _there may be a contradiction between the discoveries of geology and
our preconceived interpretations of the Bible_. But this is not because
the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation is wrong.” (The
italics in all cases are our own.)
Elsewhere he says: “It seems to me plainly evident that the record of
Genesis, when read fairly, and not in the light of our prejudices—_and
mind you_, _the essence of Popery is to read the Bible in the light of
our opinions_, _instead of viewing our opinions in the light of the
Bible_, _in its plain and obvious sense_—falls in perfectly with the
assertion of geologists.”
On comparing these two passages, we gather that when Dr. Cumming, under
stress of geological discovery, assigns to the biblical text a meaning
entirely different from that which, on his own showing, was universally
ascribed to it for more than three thousand years, he regards himself as
“viewing his opinions in the light of the Bible in its plain and obvious
sense!” Now he is reduced to one of two alternatives: either he must
hold that the “plain and obvious meaning” of the whole Bible differs from
age to age, so that the criterion of its meaning lies in the sum of
knowledge possessed by each successive age—the Bible being an elastic
garment for the growing thought of mankind; or he must hold that some
portions are amenable to this criterion, and others not so. In the
former case, he accepts the principle of interpretation adopted by the
early German rationalists; in the latter case he has to show a further
criterion by which we can judge what parts of the Bible are elastic and
what rigid. If he says that the interpretation of the text is rigid
wherever it treats of doctrines necessary to salvation, we answer, that
for doctrines to be necessary to salvation they must first be true; and
in order to be true, according to his own principle, they must be founded
on a correct interpretation of the biblical text. Thus he makes the
necessity of doctrines to salvation the criterion of infallible
interpretation, and infallible interpretation the criterion of doctrines
being necessary to salvation. He is whirled round in a circle, having,
by admitting the principle of novelty in interpretation, completely
deprived himself of a basis. That he should seize the very moment in
which he is most palpably betraying that he has no test of biblical truth
beyond his own opinion, as an appropriate occasion for flinging the
rather novel reproach against Popery that its essence is to “read the
Bible in the light of our opinions,” would be an almost pathetic
self-exposure, if it were not disgusting. Imbecility that is not even
meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes simply odious.
Parenthetic lashes of this kind against Popery are very frequent with Dr.
Cumming, and occur even in his more devout passages, where their
introduction must surely disturb the spiritual exercises of his hearers.
Indeed, Roman Catholics fare worse with him even than infidels. Infidels
are the small vermin—the mice to be bagged _en passant_. The main object
of his chase—the rats which are to be nailed up as trophies—are the Roman
Catholics. Romanism is the masterpiece of Satan; but reassure
yourselves! Dr. Cumming has been created. Antichrist is enthroned in the
Vatican; but he is stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown-court.
The personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very prominent tenet
in Dr. Cumming’s discourses; those who doubt it are, he thinks,
“generally specimens of the victims of Satan as a triumphant seducer;”
and it is through the medium of this doctrine that he habitually
contemplates Roman Catholics. They are the puppets of which the devil
holds the strings. It is only exceptionally that he speaks of them as
fellow-men, acted on by the same desires, fears, and hopes as himself;
his _rule_ is to hold them up to his hearers as foredoomed instruments of
Satan and vessels of wrath. If he is obliged to admit that they are “no
shams,” that they are “thoroughly in earnest”—that is because they are
inspired by hell, because they are under an “infra-natural” influence.
If their missionaries are found wherever Protestant missionaries go, this
zeal in propagating their faith is not in them a consistent virtue, as it
is in Protestants, but a “melancholy fact,” affording additional evidence
that they are instigated and assisted by the devil. And Dr. Cumming is
inclined to think that they work miracles, because that is no more than
might be expected from the known ability of Satan who inspires them.
{86a} He admits, indeed, that “there is a fragment of the Church of
Christ in the very bosom of that awful apostasy,” {86b} and that there
are members of the Church of Rome in glory; but this admission is rare
and episodical—is a declaration, _pro formâ_, about as influential on the
general disposition and habits as an aristocrat’s profession of
democracy.
This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic of Dr.
Cumming’s teaching—the _absence of genuine charity_. It is true that he
makes large profession of tolerance and liberality within a certain
circle; he exhorts Christians to unity; he would have Churchmen
fraternize with Dissenters, and exhorts these two branches of God’s
family to defer the settlement of their differences till the millennium.
But the love thus taught is the love of the _clan_, which is the
correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sympathy and
helpfulness toward men as men, but toward men as Christians, and as
Christians in the sense of a small minority. Dr. Cumming’s religion may
demand a tribute of love, but it gives a charter to hatred; it may enjoin
charity, but it fosters all uncharitableness. If I believe that God
tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates His own enemies
and requires me to have one will with Him, which has the larger scope,
love or hatred? And we refer to those pages of Dr. Cumming’s in which he
opposes Roman Catholics, Puseyites, and infidels—pages which form the
larger proportion of what he has published—for proof that the idea of God
which both the logic and spirit of his discourses keep present to his
hearers, is that of a God who hates his enemies, a God who teaches love
by fierce denunciations of wrath—a God who encourages obedience to his
precepts by elaborately revealing to us that his own government is in
precise opposition to those precepts. We know the usual evasions on this
subject. We know Dr. Cumming would say that even Roman Catholics are to
be loved and succored as men; that he would help even that “unclean
spirit,” Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But who that is in the
slightest degree acquainted with the action of the human mind will
believe that any genuine and large charity can grow out of an exercise of
love which is always to have an _arrière-pensée_ of hatred? Of what
quality would be the conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a
wife, but hated her as a woman? It is reserved for the regenerate mind,
according to Dr. Cumming’s conception of it, to be “wise, amazed,
temperate and furious, loyal and neutral, in a moment.” Precepts of
charity uttered with a faint breath at the end of a sermon are perfectly
futile, when all the force of the lungs has been spent in keeping the
hearer’s mind fixed on the conception of his fellow-men not as
fellow-sinners and fellow-sufferers, but as agents of hell, as automata
through whom Satan plays his game upon earth—not on objects which call
forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in the most
strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification of human things
with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss,
scorpions whose sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the
beast, and unclean spirits like frogs. You might as well attempt to
educate the child’s sense of beauty by hanging its nursery with the
horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early painters represented
the Last Judgment, as expect Christian graces to flourish on that
prophetic interpretation which Dr. Cumming offers as the principal
nutriment of his flock. Quite apart from the critical basis of that
interpretation, quite apart from the degree of truth there may be in Dr.
Cumming’s prognostications—questions into which we do not choose to
enter—his use of prophecy must be _à priori_ condemned in the judgment of
right-minded persons, by its results as testified in the net moral effect
of his sermons. The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely
inspired system, believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely
the saving but the educating of men’s souls, the creating within them of
holy dispositions, the subduing of egoistical pretensions, and the
perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God—a will synonymous
with goodness and truth—may be done on earth. But what relation to all
this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian
in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is
the wild beast in the shape of the great red dragon, and two thirds of
mankind the victims—the whole provided and got up by God for the
edification of the saints? The demonstration that the Second Advent is
at hand, if true, can have no really holy, spiritual effect; the highest
state of mind inculcated by the Gospel is resignation to the disposal of
God’s providence—“Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; whether we die,
we die unto the Lord”—not an eagerness to see a temporal manifestation
which shall confound the enemies of God and give exaltation to the
saints; it is to dwell in Christ by spiritual communion with his nature,
not to fix the date when He shall appear in the sky. Dr. Cumming’s
delight in shadowing forth the downfall of the Man of Sin, in
prognosticating the battle of Gog and Magog, and in advertising the
pre-millennial Advent, is simply the transportation of political passions
on to a so-called religious platform; it is the anticipation of the
triumph of “our party,” accomplished by our principal men being “sent
for” into the clouds. Let us be understood to speak in all seriousness.
If we were in search of amusement, we should not seek for it by examining
Dr. Cumming’s works in order to ridicule them. We are simply discharging
a disagreeable duty in delivering our opinion that, judged by the highest
standard even of orthodox Christianity, they are little calculated to
produce—
“A closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;”
but are more likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pretension, a
hard and condemnatory spirit toward one’s fellow-men, and a busy
occupation with the minutiæ of events, instead of a reverent
contemplation of great facts and a wise application of great principles.
It would be idle to consider Dr. Cumming’s theory of prophecy in any
other light; as a philosophy of history or a specimen of biblical
interpretation, it bears about the same relation to the extension of
genuine knowledge as the astrological “house” in the heavens bears to the
true structure and relations of the universe.
The slight degree in which Dr. Cumming’s faith is imbued with truly human
sympathies is exhibited in the way he treats the doctrine of Eternal
Punishment. Here a little of that readiness to strain the letter of the
Scriptures which he so often manifests when his object is to prove a
point against Romanism, would have been an amiable frailty if it had been
applied on the side of mercy. When he is bent on proving that the
prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second Epistle to the
Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can extort from the innocent word
_καθισαι_ the meaning _cathedrize_, though why we are to translate “He as
God cathedrizes in the temple of God,” any more than we are to translate
“cathedrize here, while I go and pray yonder,” it is for Dr. Cumming to
show more clearly than he has yet done. But when rigorous literality
will favor the conclusion that the greater proportion of the human race
will be eternally miserable—_then_ he is rigorously literal.
He says: “The Greek words, _εις_, _τους αιώνας των αιώνων_, here
translated ‘everlasting,’ signify literally ‘unto the ages of ages,’ αιει
ων, ‘always being,’ that is, everlasting, ceaseless existence. Plato
uses the word in this sense when he says, ‘The gods that live forever.’
_But I must also admit_ that this word is used several times in a limited
extent—as for instance, ‘The everlasting hills.’ Of course this does not
mean that there never will be a time when the hills will cease to stand;
the expression here is evidently figurative, but it implies eternity.
The hills shall remain as long as the earth lasts, and no hand has power
to remove them but that Eternal One which first called them into being;
_so the state of the soul_ remains the same after death as long as the
soul exists, and no one has power to alter it. The same word is often
applied to denote the existence of God—‘the Eternal God.’ Can we limit
the word when applied to him? Because occasionally used in a limited
sense, we must not infer it is always so. ‘Everlasting’ plainly means in
Scripture ‘without end;’ it is only to be explained figuratively when it
is evident it cannot be interpreted in any other way.”
We do not discuss whether Dr. Cumming’s interpretation accords with the
meaning of the New Testament writers: we simply point to the fact that
the text becomes elastic for him when he wants freer play for his
prejudices, while he makes it an adamantine barrier against the admission
that mercy will ultimately triumph—that God, _i.e._, Love, will be all in
all. He assures us that he does not “delight to dwell on the misery of
the lost:” and we believe him. That misery does not seem to be a
question of feeling with him, either one way or the other. He does not
merely resign himself to the awful mystery of eternal punishment; he
contends for it. Do we object, he asks, {90} to everlasting happiness?
then why object to everlasting misery?—reasoning which is perhaps felt to
be cogent by theologians who anticipate the everlasting happiness for
themselves, and the everlasting misery for their neighbors.
The compassion of some Christians has been glad to take refuge in the
opinion that the Bible allows the supposition of annihilation for the
impenitent; but the rigid sequence of Dr. Cumming’s reasoning will not
admit of this idea. He sees that flax is made into linen, and linen into
paper; that paper, when burned, partly ascends as smoke and then again
descends in rain, or in dust and carbon. “Not one particle of the
original flax is lost, although there may be not one particle that has
not undergone an entire change: annihilation is not, but change of form
is. _It will be thus with our bodies at the resurrection_. The death of
the body means not annihilation. _Not one feature of the face_ will be
annihilated.” Having established the perpetuity of the body by this
close and clear analogy, namely, that _as_ there is a total change in the
particles of flax in consequence of which they no longer appear as flax,
_so_ there will _not_ be a total change in the particles of the human
body, but they will reappear as the human body, he does not seem to
consider that the perpetuity of the body involves the perpetuity of the
soul, but requires separate evidence for this, and finds such evidence by
begging the very question at issue—namely, by asserting that the text of
the Scripture implies “the perpetuity of the punishment of the lost, and
the consciousness of the punishment which they endure.” Yet it is
drivelling like this which is listened to and lauded as eloquence by
hundreds, and which a Doctor of Divinity can believe that he has his
“reward as a saint” for preaching and publishing!
One more characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s writings, and we have done.
This is the _perverted moral judgment_ that everywhere reigns in them.
Not that this perversion is peculiar to Dr. Cumming: it belongs to the
dogmatic system which he shares with all evangelical believers. But the
abstract tendencies of systems are represented in very different degrees,
according to the different characters of those who embrace them; just as
the same food tells differently on different constitutions: and there are
certain qualities in Dr. Cumming that cause the perversion of which we
speak to exhibit itself with peculiar prominence in his teaching. A
single extract will enable us to explain what we mean:
“The ‘thoughts’ are evil. If it were possible for human eye to
discern and to detect the thoughts that flutter around the heart of
an unregenerate man—to mark their hue and their multitude, it would
be found that they are indeed ‘evil.’ We speak not of the thief, and
the murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw
down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable
character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin; but we refer to
the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest
moralities of life—by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and
the interchange of the sweetest reciprocities—and of these men, if
unrenewed and unchanged, we pronounce that their thoughts are evil.
To ascertain this, we must refer to the object around which our
thoughts ought continually to circulate. The Scriptures assert that
this object is _the glory of God_; that for this we ought to think,
to act, and to speak; and that in thus thinking, acting, and
speaking, there is involved the purest and most endearing bliss. Now
it will be found true of the most amiable men, that with all their
good society and kindliness of heart, and all their strict and
unbending integrity, they never or rarely think of the glory of God.
The question never occurs to them—Will this redound to the glory of
God? Will this make his name more known, his being more loved, his
praise more sung? And just inasmuch as their every thought comes
short of this lofty aim, in so much does it come short of good, and
entitle itself to the character of evil. If the glory of God is not
the absorbing and the influential aim of their thoughts, then they
are evil; but God’s glory never enters into their minds. They are
amiable, because it chances to be one of the constitutional
tendencies of their individual character, left uneffaced by the Fall;
and _they are just and upright_, _because they have perhaps no
occasion to be otherwise_, _or find it subservient to their interests
to maintain such a character_.”—“Occ. Disc.” vol. i. p. 8.
Again we read (Ibid. p. 236):
“There are traits in the Christian character which the mere worldly
man cannot understand. He can understand the outward morality, but
he cannot understand the inner spring of it; he can understand
Dorcas’ liberality to the poor, but he cannot penetrate the ground of
Dorcas’ liberality. _Some men give to the poor because they are
ostentatious_, _or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge
their __neglect_; _but the Christian gives to the poor_, _not only
because he has sensibilities like other men_, but because inasmuch as
ye did it to the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”
Before entering on the more general question involved in these
quotations, we must point to the clauses we have marked with italics,
where Dr. Cumming appears to express sentiments which, we are happy to
think, are not shared by the majority of his brethren in the faith. Dr.
Cumming, it seems, is unable to conceive that the natural man can have
any other motive for being just and upright than that it is useless to be
otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable; according to
his experience, between the feelings of ostentation and selfish alarm and
the feeling of love to Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead
a man to relieve want. Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it
is Dr. Cumming’s exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather
than his sentiments themselves, still, the fact that the deficiency lies
precisely here, and that he can overlook it not only in the haste of oral
delivery but in the examination of proof-sheets, is strongly significant
of his mental bias—of the faint degree in which he sympathizes with the
disinterested elements of human feeling, and of the fact, which we are
about to dwell upon, that those feelings are totally absent from his
religious theory. Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in
fulminating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral
elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his
theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a perpetual
rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he
should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do
not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its
beauty or justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine,
pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and therefore
positively noxious. Dr. Cumming is fond of showing up the teaching of
Romanism, and accusing it of undermining true morality: it is time he
should be told that there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical
men, who hold precisely the same opinion of his own teaching—with this
difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of Satan, but
as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of
egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs.
Dr. Cumming’s theory, as we have seen, is that actions are good or evil
according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference
to the “glory of God.” God, then, in Dr. Cumming’s conception, is a
being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and
justice, considered as affecting the well-being of his creatures; He has
satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and
dispositions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sympathy
with men by anxiety for the “glory of God.” The deed of Grace Darling,
when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning men and women, was
not good if it was only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her
to brave death for the chance of saving others; it was only good if she
asked herself—Will this redound to the glory of God? The man who endures
tortures rather than betray a trust, the man who spends years in toil in
order to discharge an obligation from which the law declares him free,
must be animated not by the spirit of fidelity to his fellow-man, but by
a desire to make “the name of God more known.” The sweet charities of
domestic life—the ready hand and the soothing word in sickness, the
forbearance toward frailties, the prompt helpfulness in all efforts and
sympathy in all joys, are simply evil if they result from a
“constitutional tendency,” or from dispositions disciplined by the
experience of suffering and the perception of moral loveliness. A wife
is not to devote herself to her husband out of love to him and a sense of
the duties implied by a close relation—she is to be a faithful wife for
the glory of God; if she feels her natural affections welling up too
strongly, she is to repress them; it will not do to act from natural
affection—she must think of the glory of God. A man is to guide his
affairs with energy and discretion, not from an honest desire to fulfil
his responsibilities as a member of society and a father, but—that “God’s
praise may be sung.” Dr. Cumming’s Christian pays his debts for the
glory of God; were it not for the coercion of that supreme motive, it
would be evil to pay them. A man is not to be just from a feeling of
justice; he is not to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his
fellow-men; he is not to be a tender husband and father out of affection:
all these natural muscles and fibres are to be torn away and replaced by
a patent steel-spring—anxiety for the “glory of God.”
Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the complete prevalence
of such a theory. Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human
nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas
may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round
the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give
way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to the
hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there
perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development
than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct
promptings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are
strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into
activity by their proper objects; pity is strong only because we are
strongly impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is
compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm
when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent. If the soothing or the
succor be given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed
ceases to be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of
obedience, of self-interest, or vanity. Accessory motives may aid in
producing an _action_, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct
motive; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the action of
accessory motives will be excluded. If, then, as Dr. Cumming inculcates,
the glory of God is to be “the absorbing and the influential aim” in our
thoughts and actions, this must tend to neutralize the human sympathies;
the stream of feeling will be diverted from its natural current in order
to feed an artificial canal. The idea of God is really moral in its
influence—it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man—only
when God is contemplated as sympathizing with the pure elements of human
feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attributes which we recognize
to be moral in humanity. In this light, the idea of God and the sense of
His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort,
on the same principle that human sympathy is found a source of strength:
the brave man feels braver when he knows that another stout heart is
beating time with his; the devoted woman who is wearing out her years in
patient effort to alleviate suffering or save vice from the last stages
of degradation, finds aid in the pressure of a friendly hand which tells
her that there is one who understands her deeds, and in her place would
do the like. The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel
and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too
languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an
extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy;
and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under
the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of Jesus as
“God manifest in the flesh.” But Dr. Cumming’s God is the very opposite
of all this: he is a God who instead of sharing and aiding our human
sympathies, is directly in collision with them; who instead of
strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that
they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts himself
between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have
relation to Him. He is a God who, instead of adding his solar force to
swell the tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common life
in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us to check those
impulses, lest they should prevent us from thinking of His glory. It is
in vain for Dr. Cumming to say that we are to love man for God’s sake:
with the conception of God which his teaching presents, the love of man
for God’s sake involves, as his writings abundantly show, a strong
principle of hatred. We can only love one being for the sake of another
when there is an habitual delight in associating the idea of those two
beings—that is, when the object of our indirect love is a source of joy
and honor to the object of our direct love; but according to Dr.
Cumming’s theory, the majority of mankind—the majority of his
neighbors—are in precisely the opposite relation to God. His soul has no
pleasure in them, they belong more to Satan than to Him, and if they
contribute to His glory, it is against their will. Dr. Cumming then can
only love _some_ men for God’s sake; the rest he must in consistency
_hate_ for God’s sake.
There must be many, even in the circle of Dr. Cumming’s admirers, who
would be revolted by the doctrine we have just exposed, if their natural
good sense and healthy feeling were not early stifled by dogmatic
beliefs, and their reverence misled by pious phrases. But as it is, many
a rational question, many a generous instinct, is repelled as the
suggestion of a supernatural enemy, or as the ebullition of human pride
and corruption. This state of inward contradiction can be put an end to
only by the conviction that the free and diligent exertion of the
intellect, instead of being a sin, is part of their responsibility—that
Right and Reason are synonymous. The fundamental faith for man is, faith
in the result of a brave, honest, and steady use of all his faculties:
“Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul according well
May make one music as before,
But vaster.”
Before taking leave of Dr. Cumming, let us express a hope that we have in
no case exaggerated the unfavorable character of the inferences to be
drawn from his pages. His creed often obliges him to hope the worst of
men, and exert himself in proving that the worst is true; but thus far we
are happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute
unworthy motives to Dr. Cumming, no opinions, religious or irreligious,
which can make it a gratification to us to detect him in delinquencies.
On the contrary, the better we are able to think of him as a man, while
we are obliged to disapprove him as a theologian, the stronger will be
the evidence for our conviction, that the tendency toward good in human
nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which
insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic
perversions.