ather 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
suppos