and upright than that it is useless to be
otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable; according to
his experience, between the feelings of ostentation and selfish alarm and
the feeling of love to Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead
a man to relieve want. Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it
is Dr. Cumming's exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather
than his sentiments themselves, still, the fact that the deficiency lies
precisely here, and that he can overlook it not only in the haste of oral
delivery but in the examination of proof-sheets, is strongly significant
of his mental bias--of the faint degree in which he sympathizes with the
disinterested elements of human feeling, and of the fact, which we are
about to dwell upon, that those feelings are totally absent from his
religious theory. Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in
fulminating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral
elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his
theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a perpetual
rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he
should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do
not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its
beauty or justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine,
pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and therefore
positively noxious. Dr. Cumming is fond of showing up the teaching of
Romanism, and accusing it of undermining true morality: it is time he
should be told that there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical
men, who hold precisely the same opinion of his own teaching--with this
difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of Satan, but
as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of
egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs.

Dr. Cumming's theory, as we have seen, is that actions are good or evil
according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference
to the "glory of God." God, then, in Dr. Cumming's conception, is a
being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and
justice, considered as affecting the well-being of his creatures; He has
satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and
dispositions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sympathy
with men by anxiety