Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (599 page)

Dr. Cumming’s principles — or, we should rather say, confused
notions — of biblical interpretation, as exhibited in this volume, are particularly significant of his mental calibre.  He says (“Church before the Flood,” ): “Men of science, who are full of scientific investigation and enamored of scientific discovery, will hesitate before they accept a book which, they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth, or among the stars of the sky.  To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, there is not the least dissonance between God’s written book and the most mature discoveries of geological science.  One thing, however, there may be:
there may be a contradiction between the discoveries of geology and our preconceived interpretations of the Bible
.  But this is not because the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation is wrong.”  (The italics in all cases are our own.)

Elsewhere he says: “It seems to me plainly evident that the record of Genesis, when read fairly, and not in the light of our prejudices —
and mind you
,
the essence of Popery is to read the Bible in the light of our opinions
,
instead of viewing our opinions in the light of the Bible
,
in its plain and obvious sense
— falls in perfectly with the assertion of geologists.”

On comparing these two passages, we gather that when Dr. Cumming, under stress of geological discovery, assigns to the biblical text a meaning entirely different from that which, on his own showing, was universally ascribed to it for more than three thousand years, he regards himself as “viewing his opinions in the light of the Bible in its plain and obvious sense!”  Now he is reduced to one of two alternatives: either he must hold that the “plain and obvious meaning” of the whole Bible differs from age to age, so that the criterion of its meaning lies in the sum of knowledge possessed by each successive age — the Bible being an elastic garment for the growing thought of mankind; or he must hold that some portions are amenable to this criterion, and others not so.  In the former case, he accepts the principle of interpretation adopted by the early German rationalists; in the latter case he has to show a
further criterion by which we can judge what parts of the Bible are elastic and what rigid.  If he says that the interpretation of the text is rigid wherever it treats of doctrines necessary to salvation, we answer, that for doctrines to be necessary to salvation they must first be true; and in order to be true, according to his own principle, they must be founded on a correct interpretation of the biblical text.  Thus he makes the necessity of doctrines to salvation the criterion of infallible interpretation, and infallible interpretation the criterion of doctrines being necessary to salvation.  He is whirled round in a circle, having, by admitting the principle of novelty in interpretation, completely deprived himself of a basis.  That he should seize the very moment in which he is most palpably betraying that he has no test of biblical truth beyond his own opinion, as an appropriate occasion for flinging the rather novel reproach against Popery that its essence is to “read the Bible in the light of our opinions,” would be an almost pathetic self-exposure, if it were not disgusting.  Imbecility that is not even meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes simply odious.

Parenthetic lashes of this kind against Popery are very frequent with Dr. Cumming, and occur even in his more devout passages, where their introduction must surely disturb the spiritual exercises of his hearers.  Indeed, Roman Catholics fare worse with him even than infidels.  Infidels are the small vermin — the mice to be bagged
en passant
.  The main object of his chase — the rats which are to be nailed up as trophies — are the Roman Catholics.  Romanism is the masterpiece of Satan; but reassure yourselves! Dr. Cumming has been created.  Antichrist is enthroned in the Vatican; but he is stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown-court.  The personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very prominent tenet in Dr. Cumming’s discourses; those who doubt it are, he thinks, “generally specimens of the victims of Satan as a triumphant seducer;” and it is through the medium of this doctrine that he habitually contemplates Roman Catholics. 
They are the puppets of which the devil holds the strings.  It is only exceptionally that he speaks of them as fellow-men, acted on by the same desires, fears, and hopes as himself; his
rule
is to hold them up to his hearers as foredoomed instruments of Satan and vessels of wrath.  If he is obliged to admit that they are “no shams,” that they are “thoroughly in earnest” — that is because they are inspired by hell, because they are under an “infra-natural” influence.  If their missionaries are found wherever Protestant missionaries go, this zeal in propagating their faith is not in them a consistent virtue, as it is in Protestants, but a “melancholy fact,” affording additional evidence that they are instigated and assisted by the devil.  And Dr. Cumming is inclined to think that they work miracles, because that is no more than might be expected from the known ability of Satan who inspires them.
  He admits, indeed, that “there is a fragment of the Church of Christ in the very bosom of that awful apostasy,”
 
and that there are members of the Church of Rome in glory; but this admission is rare and episodical — is a declaration,
pro formâ
, about as influential on the general disposition and habits as an aristocrat’s profession of democracy.

This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s teaching — the
absence of genuine charity
.  It is true that he 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
arrière-pensée
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 call forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in the most strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification of human things with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss, scorpions whose sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the beast, and unclean spirits like frogs.  You might as well attempt to educate the child’s sense
of beauty by hanging its nursery with the horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early painters represented the Last Judgment, as expect Christian graces to flourish on that prophetic interpretation which Dr. Cumming offers as the principal nutriment of his flock.  Quite apart from the critical basis of that interpretation, quite apart from the degree of truth there may be in Dr. Cumming’s prognostications — questions into which we do not choose to enter — his use of prophecy must be
à priori
condemned in the judgment of right-minded persons, by its results as testified in the net moral effect of his sermons.  The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system, believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but the educating of men’s souls, the creating within them of holy dispositions, the subduing of egoistical pretensions, and the perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God — a will synonymous with goodness and truth — may be done on earth.  But what relation to all this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is the wild beast in the shape of the great red dragon, and two thirds of mankind the victims — the whole provided and got up by God for the edification of the saints?  The demonstration that the Second Advent is at hand, if true, can have no really holy, spiritual effect; the highest state of mind inculcated by the Gospel is resignation to the disposal of God’s providence — “Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; whether we die, we die unto the Lord” — not an eagerness to see a temporal manifestation which shall confound the enemies of God and give exaltation to the saints; it is to dwell in Christ by spiritual communion with his nature, not to fix the date when He shall appear in the sky.  Dr. Cumming’s delight in shadowing forth the downfall of the Man of Sin, in prognosticating the battle of Gog and Magog, and in advertising the pre-millennial Advent, is simply the transportation of political passions on to a so-called religious platform; it is the anticipation of the triumph of “our party,”
accomplished by our principal men being “sent for” into the clouds.  Let us be understood to speak in all seriousness.  If we were in search of amusement, we should not seek for it by examining Dr. Cumming’s works in order to ridicule them.  We are simply discharging a disagreeable duty in delivering our opinion that, judged by the highest standard even of orthodox Christianity, they are little calculated to produce —

“A closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;”

but are more likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pretension, a hard and condemnatory spirit toward one’s fellow-men, and a busy occupation with the minutiæ of events, instead of a reverent contemplation of great facts and a wise application of great principles.  It would be idle to consider Dr. Cumming’s theory of prophecy in any other light; as a philosophy of history or a specimen of biblical interpretation, it bears about the same relation to the extension of genuine knowledge as the astrological “house” in the heavens bears to the true structure and relations of the universe.

The slight degree in which Dr. Cumming’s faith is imbued with truly human sympathies is exhibited in the way he treats the doctrine of Eternal Punishment.  Here a little of that readiness to strain the letter of the Scriptures which he so often manifests when his object is to prove a point against Romanism, would have been an amiable frailty if it had been applied on the side of mercy.  When he is bent on proving that the prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can extort from the innocent word
º±¸¹Ã±¹
the meaning
cathedrize
, though why we are to translate “He as God cathedrizes in the temple of God,” any more than we are to translate “cathedrize here, while I go and pray yonder,” it is for Dr. Cumming to show more clearly than he has yet done.  But when rigorous literality will favor the conclusion that the greater proportion of the human race will be eternally miserable —
then
he is rigorously literal.

He says: “The Greek words,
µ¹Â
,
Ä¿Å ±¹É½±Â Äɽ ±¹É½É½
, here translated ‘everlasting,’ signify literally ‘unto the ages of ages,’ ±¹µ¹ ɽ, ‘always being,’ that is, everlasting, ceaseless existence.  Plato uses the word in this sense when he says, ‘The gods that live forever.’ 
But I must also admit
that this word is used several times in a limited extent — as for instance, ‘The everlasting hills.’  Of course this does not mean that there never will be a time when the hills will cease to stand; the expression here is evidently figurative, but it implies eternity.  The hills shall remain as long as the earth lasts, and no hand has power to remove them but that Eternal One which first called them into being;
so the state of the soul
remains the same after death as long as the soul exists, and no one has power to alter it.  The same word is often applied to denote the existence of God — ‘the Eternal God.’  Can we limit the word when applied to him?  Because occasionally used in a limited sense, we must not infer it is always so.  ‘Everlasting’ plainly means in Scripture ‘without end;’ it is only to be explained figuratively when it is evident it cannot be interpreted in any other way.”

We do not discuss whether Dr. Cumming’s interpretation accords with the meaning of the New Testament writers: we simply point to the fact that the text becomes elastic for him when he wants freer play for his prejudices, while he makes it an adamantine barrier against the admission that mercy will ultimately triumph — that God,
i.e.
, Love, will be all in all.  He assures us that he does not “delight to dwell on the misery of the lost:” and we believe him.  That misery does not seem to be a question of feeling with him, either one way or the other.  He does not merely resign himself to the awful mystery of eternal punishment; he contends for it.  Do we object, he asks,
 
to everlasting happiness? then why object to everlasting misery? — reasoning which is perhaps felt to be cogent by theologians who anticipate the everlasting happiness for themselves, and the everlasting misery for their neighbors.