Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (600 page)

The compassion of some Christians has been glad to take refuge in the opinion that the Bible allows the supposition of annihilation for the impenitent; but the rigid sequence of Dr. Cumming’s reasoning will not admit of this idea.  He sees that flax is made into linen, and linen into paper; that paper, when burned, partly ascends as smoke and then again descends in rain, or in dust and carbon.  “Not one particle of the original flax is lost, although there may be not one particle that has not undergone an entire change: annihilation is not, but change of form is. 
It will be thus with our bodies at the resurrection
.  The death of the body means not annihilation. 
Not one feature of the face
will be annihilated.”  Having established the perpetuity of the body by this close and clear analogy, namely, that
as
there is a total change in the particles of flax in consequence of which they no longer appear as flax,
so
there will
not
be a total change in the particles of the human body, but they will reappear as the human body, he does not seem to consider that the perpetuity of the body involves the perpetuity of the soul, but requires separate evidence for this, and finds such evidence by begging the very question at issue — namely, by asserting that the text of the Scripture implies “the perpetuity of the punishment of the lost, and the consciousness of the punishment which they endure.”  Yet it is drivelling like this which is listened to and lauded as eloquence by hundreds, and which a Doctor of Divinity can believe that he has his “reward as a saint” for preaching and publishing!

One more characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s writings, and we have done.  This is the
perverted moral judgment
that everywhere reigns in them.  Not that this perversion is peculiar to Dr. Cumming: it belongs to the dogmatic system which he shares with all evangelical believers.  But the abstract tendencies of systems are represented in very different degrees, according to the different characters of those who embrace them; just as the same food tells differently on different constitutions: and there are certain qualities in Dr.
Cumming that cause the perversion of which we speak to exhibit itself with peculiar prominence in his teaching.  A single extract will enable us to explain what we mean:

“The ‘thoughts’ are evil.  If it were possible for human eye to discern and to detect the thoughts that flutter around the heart of an unregenerate man — to mark their hue and their multitude, it would be found that they are indeed ‘evil.’  We speak not of the thief, and the murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin; but we refer to the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest moralities of life — by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the interchange of the sweetest reciprocities — and of these men, if unrenewed and unchanged, we pronounce that their thoughts are evil.  To ascertain this, we must refer to the object around which our thoughts ought continually to circulate.  The Scriptures assert that this object is
the glory of God
; that for this we ought to think, to act, and to speak; and that in thus thinking, acting, and speaking, there is involved the purest and most endearing bliss.  Now it will be found true of the most amiable men, that with all their good society and kindliness of heart, and all their strict and unbending integrity, they never or rarely think of the glory of God.  The question never occurs to them — Will this redound to the glory of God?  Will this make his name more known, his being more loved, his praise more sung?  And just inasmuch as their every thought comes short of this lofty aim, in so much does it come short of good, and entitle itself to the character of evil.  If the glory of God is not the absorbing and the influential aim of their thoughts, then they are evil; but God’s glory never enters into their minds.  They are amiable, because it chances to be one of the constitutional tendencies of their individual character, left uneffaced by the Fall; and
they an just and upright
,
because they have perhaps no occasion to be otherwise
,
or find it subservient to their interests to maintain such a character
.” — “Occ. Disc.” vol. i. .

Again we read (Ibid. ):

“There are traits in the Christian character which the mere worldly man cannot understand.  He can understand the outward morality, but he cannot understand the inner spring of it; he can understand Dorcas’ liberality to the poor, but he cannot penetrate the ground of Dorcas’ liberality. 
Some men give to the poor because they are ostentatious
,
or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge their
neglect
;
but the Christian gives to the poor
,
not only because he has sensibilities like other men
, but because inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”

Before entering on the more general question involved in these quotations, we must point to the clauses we have marked with italics, where Dr. Cumming appears to express sentiments which, we are happy to think, are not shared by the majority of his brethren in the faith.  Dr. Cumming, it seems, is unable to conceive that the natural man can have any other motive for being just 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 for the “glory of God.”  The deed of Grace Darling, when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning men and women, was not good if it was only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her to brave death for the chance of saving others; it was only good if she asked herself — Will this redound to the glory of God?  The man who endures tortures rather than betray a trust, the man who spends years in toil in order to discharge an obligation from which the law declares him free, must be animated not by the spirit of fidelity to his fellow-man, but by a desire to make “the name of God more known.”  The sweet charities of domestic life — the ready hand and the soothing word in sickness, the forbearance toward frailties, the prompt helpfulness in all efforts and sympathy in all joys, are simply evil if they result from a “constitutional tendency,” or from dispositions disciplined by the experience of suffering and the perception of moral loveliness.  A wife is not to devote herself to her husband out of love to him and a sense of the duties implied by a close relation — she is to be a faithful wife for the glory of God; if she feels her natural affections welling up too strongly, she is to repress them; it will not do to act from natural affection — she must think of the glory of God.  A man is to guide his affairs with energy and discretion, not from an honest desire to
fulfil his responsibilities as a member of society and a father, but — that “God’s praise may be sung.”  Dr. Cumming’s Christian pays his debts for the glory of God; were it not for the coercion of that supreme motive, it would be evil to pay them.  A man is not to be just from a feeling of justice; he is not to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his fellow-men; he is not to be a tender husband and father out of affection: all these natural muscles and fibres are to be torn away and replaced by a patent steel-spring — anxiety for the “glory of God.”

Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the complete prevalence of such a theory.  Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap.  But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the sympathetic feelings.  Benevolence and justice are strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into activity by their proper objects; pity is strong only because we are strongly impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent.  If the soothing or the succor be given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed ceases to be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of obedience, of self-interest, or vanity.  Accessory motives may aid in producing an
action
, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct motive; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the action of accessory motives will be excluded.  If, then, as Dr. Cumming inculcates, the glory of God is to be “the absorbing and the influential aim” in our thoughts and actions, this must
tend to neutralize the human sympathies; the stream of feeling will be diverted from its natural current in order to feed an artificial canal.  The idea of God is really moral in its influence — it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man — only when God is contemplated as sympathizing with the pure elements of human feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attributes which we recognize to be moral in humanity.  In this light, the idea of God and the sense of His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort, on the same principle that human sympathy is found a source of strength: the brave man feels braver when he knows that another stout heart is beating time with his; the devoted woman who is wearing out her years in patient effort to alleviate suffering or save vice from the last stages of degradation, finds aid in the pressure of a friendly hand which tells her that there is one who understands her deeds, and in her place would do the like.  The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of Jesus as “God manifest in the flesh.”  But Dr. Cumming’s God is the very opposite of all this: he is a God who instead of sharing and aiding our human sympathies, is directly in collision with them; who instead of strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts himself between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have relation to Him.  He is a God who, instead of adding his solar force to swell the tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common life in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us to check those impulses, lest they should prevent us from thinking of His glory.  It is in vain for Dr. Cumming to say that we are to love man for God’s
sake: with the conception of God which his teaching presents, the love of man for God’s sake involves, as his writings abundantly show, a strong principle of hatred.  We can only love one being for the sake of another when there is an habitual delight in associating the idea of those two beings — that is, when the object of our indirect love is a source of joy and honor to the object of our direct love; but according to Dr. Cumming’s theory, the majority of mankind — the majority of his neighbors — are in precisely the opposite relation to God.  His soul has no pleasure in them, they belong more to Satan than to Him, and if they contribute to His glory, it is against their will.  Dr. Cumming then can only love
some
men for God’s sake; the rest he must in consistency
hate
for God’s sake.