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 à 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 156 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 obstinate to credit or comprehend. ‘The celebrated Mr. Cameron,’ says the minister of the Scottish Church, London, ‘was left on Drumclog a mangled corpse.’ Fine thing to be minutely acquainted with ecclesiastical history! We illiterate non-intrusionists hold, and we are afraid Mr. Cunningham among the rest, that the celebrated Cameron was killed, not at the skirmish of Drumclog, but at the skirmish of Airdmoss, which did not take place until about a twelvemonth after; but this must result surely from our ignorance. Has the Rev. Mr. Cumming no intention of settling our disputes, by giving us a new history of the Church?
That portion of the internal evidence in the article before us which depends on style and manner, seems very conclusive 157 indeed. Take some of the avowed sublimities of the Rev. Mr. Cumming. No man stands more beautifully on tiptoe when he sets himself to catch a fine thought. In describing an attached congregation, ‘The hearer’s prayers rose to heaven,’ he says, ‘and returned in the shape of broad impenetrable bucklers around the venerable man. A thousand broadswords leapt in a thousand scabbards, as if the electric eloquence of the minister found in them conductors and depositories.’
Poetry such as this is still somewhat rare; but mark the kindred beauties of the writer in Fraser. Around such men as Mr. Tait, Dr. M’Leod, and Dr. Muir, ‘must crystallize the piety and the hopes of the Scottish Church.’ What a superb figure! Only think of the Rev. Dr. Muir as of a thread in a piece of sugar candy, and the piety of the Dean of Faculty and Mr. Penney, joined to that of some four or five hundred respectable ladies of both sexes besides, all sticking out around him in cubes, hexagons, and prisms, like cleft almonds in a bishop-cake. Hardly inferior in the figurative is the passage which follows: ‘The Doctor (Dr. Chalmers) rides on at a rickety trot,––Messrs. Cunningham, Begg, and Candlish by turns whipping up the wornout Rosenante, and making the rider believe that windmills are Church principles, and the echoes of their thunder solid argument. A ditch will come; and when the first effects of the fall are over, the dumbfounded Professor will awake to the deception, and smite the minnows of vetoism hip and thigh.’ The writer of this passage is unquestionably an ingenious man, but he could surely have made a little more of the last figure. A dissertation on the hips and thighs of minnows might be made to reflect new honour on even the genius of the Rev. Mr. Cumming.
It is mainly, however, from the Episcopalian tone of the article that we derive our evidence. The writer seems to hold, with Charles II., that Presbyterianism is no fit religion 158 for a gentleman. True, the Moderates were genteel men, of polish and propriety, such as Mr. Jaffray of Dunbar, who never at synod or presbytery did or said anything that was not strictly polite; but then the Moderates had but little of Presbyterianism in their religion, and perhaps, notwithstanding their ‘quiet, amiable, and courteous demeanour,’ little of religion itself. It is to quite a different class that the hope of the writer turns. He states that ‘melancholy facts and strong arguments against the practical working of Presbytery is at this moment impressing itself in Scotland on every unprejudiced spectator;’ that there is a party, however, ‘with whom the ministerial office is a sacred investiture, transmitted by succession through pastor to pastor, and from age to age,––men inducted to their respective parishes, not because their flocks like or dislike them, but because the superintending authorities, after the exercise of solemn, minute, and patient investigation, have determined that this or that pastor is the fittest and best for this or that parish;’ that there exist in this noble party ‘the germs of a possible unity with the southern Church;’ and that there is doubtless a time coming when the body of our Establishment, ‘sick of slavery under the name of freedom, and of sheer Popery under Presbyterian colours, shall send up three of their best men to London for consecration, and Episcopacy shall again become the adoption of Scotland.’ Rarely has the imagination of the poet conjured up a vision of greater splendour. The minister of the Scotch Church, London, may die Archbishop of St. Andrews. And such an archbishop! We are told in the article that ‘the channel along which ministerial orders are to be transmitted is the pastors of the Church, whether they meet together in the presbytery, or are compressed and consolidated in the bishop.’ But is not this understating the case on the Episcopal side? What would not Scotland gain if she could compress and consolidate a simple presbytery, such as that 159 of Edinburgh––its Chalmers and its Gordon, its Candlish and its Cunningham, its Guthrie, its Brown, its Bennie, its Begg––in short, all its numerous members––into one great Bishop John Cumming, late of the Scotch Church, London! The man who converts twenty-one shillings into a gold guinea gains nothing by the process; but the case would be essentially different here, for not only would there be a great good accomplished, but also a great evil removed. As for Dr. Chalmers, it is ‘painfully evident,’ says the writer of the article, ‘that he regards only three things additional to a “supernal influence” as requisite to constitute any one a minister––a knowledge of Christianity, and endowment, and a parish;’ and as for the rest of the gentlemen named, they are just preparing to do, in an ‘ecclesiastical way in Edinburgh, what Robespierre, Marat, and others did in a corporal way in the Convention of 1793.’
Hogarth quarrelled with Churchill, and drew him as a bear in canonicals. Had he lived to quarrel with the Rev. John Cumming, he would in all probability have drawn him as a puppy in gown and band; and no one who knows aught of the painter can doubt that he would have strikingly preserved the likeness. As for ourselves, we merely indulge in a piece of conjectural criticism. The other parts of the article are cast very much into the ordinary type of that side of the controversy to which it belongs: there is rather more than the usual amount of misrepresentation, inconsistency, and abuse, with here and there a peculiarity of statement. Patrons are described as the ‘trustees of the supreme magistrate, beautifully and devoutly appointed to submit the presentee to the presbytery.’ Lord Aberdeen’s bill is eulogized as suited to ‘confer a greater boon on the laity of Scotland than was ever conferred on them by the General Assembly.’ The seven clergymen of Strathbogie are praised for ‘having rendered unto God the things that are God’s,’ ‘their enemies being judges.’ 160
The minority of the Church contains, it is stated, its best men, and its most diligent ministers. As for the majority, they have been possessed by a spirit of ‘deep delusion;’ their only idea of a ‘clergyman is a preaching machine, that makes a prodigious vociferation, and pleases the herd.’ They are destined to become’ contemptible and base;’ their attitude is an ‘unrighteous attitude;’ they are aiming, ‘like Popish priests,’ at ‘supremacy’ and a deadly despotism, through the sides of the people; they are ‘suicidally divesting themselves of their power as clergymen, by surrendering to the people essentially Episcopal functions;’ they are ‘wild men,’ and offenders against the ‘divine headship;’ and the writer holds, therefore, that if the Establishment is to be maintained in Scotland, they must be crushed, and that soon, by the strong arm of the law. We need make no further remarks on the subject. To employ one of the writer’s own illustrations, the history of Robespierre powerfully demonstrates that great vanity, great weakness, and great cruelty, may all find room together in one little mind.
March 10, 1841.