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 apos