derness 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 naive 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,