e would dethrone him;" and "advocated the very depths of
the lowest sensuality." With regard to many statements of a similar
kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming's volumes, we
presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand
character of his acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An
evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well-read. Here, however, is a
case which the extremest supposition of educated ignorance will not
reach. Even books of "evidences" quote from Voltaire the line--

"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer;"

even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of literature must know
that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist--must know that
he wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom
he believed to be a false God--must know that to say Voltaire was an
atheist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed
hereditary monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title
to the throne. That Dr. Cumming should repeat the vulgar fables about
Voltaire's death is merely what we might expect from the specimens we
have seen of his illustrative stories. A man whose accounts of his own
experience are apocryphal is not likely to put borrowed narratives to any
severe test.

The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is strikingly
typified by the way in which he alternates from the unveracious to the
absurd, from misrepresentation to contradiction. Side by side with the
abduction of "facts" such as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on
one page that the Trinity was too grand a doctrine to have been conceived
by man, and was _therefore_ Divine; and on another page, that the
Incarnation _had_ been preconceived by man, and is _therefore_ to be
accepted as Divine. But we are less concerned with the fallacy of his
"ready replies" than with their falsity; and even of this we can only
afford space for a very few specimens. Here is one: "There is a
_thousand times_ more proof that the gospel of John was written by him
than there is that the [Greek text] was written by Xenophon, or the Ars
Poetica by Horace." If Dr. Cumming had chosen Plato's Epistles or
Anacreon's Poems instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, he would
have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would have furnished a
ready reply which would have been equally effective with his
Sunday-school teachers and their