s 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 h