nfer him to be the
writer of the article in _Fraser_.

We may be of course mistaken, but the internal evidence seems
wonderfully strong. The Rev. Mr. Cumming, though emphatically powerful
in declamation, has never practised argument,--a mean and undignified
art, which he leaves to men such as Mr. Cunningham, just as the
genteel leave the art of boxing to the commonalty; and in grappling
lately with a strong-boned Irish Presbyterian, skilful of fence, he
caught, as gentlemen sometimes do, a severe fall, and began
straightway to characterize Irish Presbyterians as a set of men very
inferior indeed. Now the writer in _Fraser_ has a fling _a la Cumming_
at the Irish Presbyterians. Popular election has, it seems, done
marvellously little for them; with very few exceptions, their
'ministry' is neither 'erudite, influential, nor accomplished,' and
their Church 'exhibits the symptoms of heart disease.' Depend on it,
some stout Irish Presbyterian has entailed the shame of defeat on the
writer in _Fraser_. Mr. Cumming, in his tale, adverts to the majority
of the Scottish Church as 'radical subverters of Church and State, who
claim the Covenanters as precedents for a course of conduct from
which the dignified Henderson, the renowned Gillespie, the learned
Binning, the laborious Denham, the heavenly-minded Rutherford, the
religious Wellwood, the zealous Cameron, and the prayerful Peden,
would have revolted in horror.' The writer of the article brings out
exactly the same sentiment, though not quite so decidedly, in what Meg
Dodds would have termed a grand style of language. At no time, he
asserts, did non-intrusion exist in the sense now contended for in
Scotland; at no time might not qualified ministers be thrust upon
reclaiming parishes by the presbytery: and as for the vetoists, they
are but wild radicals, who are to be 'classified by the good sense of
England with those luminaries of the age, Dan O'Connell, John Frost,
and others of that ilk.' In the article there is a complaint that our
majority are miserably unacquainted with Scottish ecclesiastical
history; and there is special mention made of Mr. Cunningham as an
individual not only ignorant of facts, but as even incapable of being
made to feel their force. In the _Annual_, as if Mr. Cumming wished to
exemplify, there is a passage in Scottish ecclesiastical history, of
which we are certain Mr. Cunningham not only knows nothing, but which
we are sure he will prove too obsti