derstanding--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 _a 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--Linnaeus 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 exportation 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
impos