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makes large profession of tolerance and liberality within a certain
circle; he exhorts Christians to unity; he would have Churchmen
fraternize with Dissenters, and exhorts these two branches of God's
family to defer the settlement of their differences till the millennium.
But the love thus taught is the love of the _clan_, which is the
correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sympathy and
helpfulness toward men as men, but toward men as Christians, and as
Christians in the sense of a small minority. Dr. Cumming's religion may
demand a tribute of love, but it gives a charter to hatred; it may enjoin
charity, but it fosters all uncharitableness. If I believe that God
tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates His own enemies
and requires me to have one will with Him, which has the larger scope,
love or hatred? And we refer to those pages of Dr. Cumming's in which he
opposes Roman Catholics, Puseyites, and infidels--pages which form the
larger proportion of what he has published--for proof that the idea of
God which both the logic and spirit of his discourses keep present to his
hearers, is that of a God who hates his enemies, a God who teaches love
by fierce denunciations of wrath--a God who encourages obedience to his
precepts by elaborately revealing to us that his own government is in
precise opposition to those precepts. We know the usual evasions on this
subject. We know Dr. Cumming would say that even Roman Catholics are to
be loved and succored as men; that he would help even that "unclean
spirit," Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But who that is in the
slightest degree acquainted with the action of the human mind will
believe that any genuine and large charity can grow out of an exercise of
love which is always to have an _arriere-pensee_ of hatred? Of what
quality would be the conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a
wife, but hated her as a woman? It is reserved for the regenerate mind,
according to Dr. Cumming's conception of it, to be "wise, amazed,
temperate and furious, loyal and neutral, in a moment." Precepts of
charity uttered with a faint breath at the end of a sermon are perfectly
futile, when all the force of the lungs has been spent in keeping the
hearer's mind fixed on the conception of his fellow-men not as
fellow-sinners and fellow-sufferers, but as agents of hell, as automata
through whom Satan plays his game upon earth--not on objects which c