DR. CUMMING ON THE PATRIARCHS.*
IT is very easy to abuse Dr. Cumming, but the point is to explain him. How does it happen that in an age of much theological controversy, an age which respects science and has a taste for simplicity of style, theological books written by a man who is no theologian, who is totally ignorant not only of science but of scientific processes of thought, and who writes in a strain of semi- poetic childishness, find so large a circle of readers ? The popularity of Dr. Cumming's expositions of prophecy is perhaps intelligible, for everybody has in his heart a secret taste for guessing by rule, and dreambooks or books of wonders—to which class Dr. Cum- ming's expositions belong—are not required to be models either of erudition or style. People who do not believe that Ezekiel was inspired to pour forth visions of superhuman terror and beauty, in order that islanders of whom he never heard may expect a Prince whose name he could not have pronounced to do something or other in Syria, can yet feel an interest in comparing Dr. Cumming's premisses with his conclusion. But there will be almost as many readers for this book upon the Patriarchs, and we want as critics to know why. The Lives are wretchedly bad biographies of persons whose lives are related ten thousand times better in books read aloud every week in every parish in England. They contain of course no new facts, for they could contain none, and as to sug- gestions, but one in the whole book of 600 large pages strikes us as original, the half-frightened hint that as Cain can never have seen a dead human being, or learned anything about death, or known that a heavy blow would destroy the vitality of which, again, he can have perceived nothing, his guilt was at the outside only manslaughter, or, as we should add, on Dr. Cumming's own basis, was hardly guilt at all,--mere killing by misadventure. That is decidedly new though probably false for Cain saw Abel kill lambs for sacrifice, but it is almost the only thought in the whole mass of words. Dr. Cumming's usual practice is to take a few of the incidents recorded in Scripture, not all, or nearly all, and relate them in his own language, which bears to the language of Holy Writ about the relation which sour whey bears to good wine, with • The Lives and Lessons of the Pagriareha By Dr. Cumming. London: J. F. Shaw and Co. criticisms and explanations according to his own fancy, and little bursts of rhetorical nonsense. For example, he wants to say that God after the Fall showed mercy, and in leaving man hearing and sight He left him great capacities of pleasure. So he says, " Every eye is a picture-gallery, every ear an oratorio," which is just as if he had said every eye is a Titian, every ear a fiddle. Dr. Cumming's idea of criticism is to judge the Patriarchs pretty much as he would judge faulty members of his own congre- gation, i. e., with a good deal of kindliness and no insight at all ; but he is sometimes exquisitely childish. Take, for example, the comment on Adam's excuse for eating the apple :—" Adam's excuse or apology is what we should have expected. It is so ex- quisitely true to nature, so completely what we feel we should have done in similar circumstances, that we cannot but feel that, if this were not inspired, Moses must have been something more than man. Adam did not penitently say, ' 0 God, I have sinned, I have broken thy law, have mercy upon me!' but selfishly shifting the load from his own shoulders, he said, The woman thou gayest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.' This was very cowardly on the part of Adam. It indicated also a terrible degeneracy. He threw the blame off himself, where it justly rested, and wickedly and untenderly laid it on the shoulders of poor Eve; as if she alone were guilty, and he purely innocent." This is the very style of the good child's story-book, or indeed is worse, for the more skilful makers of those stories never insert reflections so obvious that they must create a sense of impertinent obtrusiveness even in the children who read them. The truism, however, is simple, but who except Dr. Cumming would dream of describing the emotions of Adam in the words of a penny-a-liner, or make the first father talk self-conscious nineteenth-century trash?—" When the weeping parents saw death for the first time, and it was the first time it had occurred since Adam and Eve were created, they started in perfect horror from the ghastly spectacle. Adam as a parent wept, and as a sinner he felt poignant remorse, while he recalled to memory his first sin, and saw its earliest rebound in dead Abel. That dead body is because I sinned. We fell in Eden, and we have dragged all humanity with us.' " There is literally not a chapter, scarcely a page of these biographies, which is not full of additions which to men who love the simplicity of the Record must seem almost blasphemies, which at the very best are weak guesses at excessively improbable possibilities. It is written, for example, that " Enoch walked with God," perhaps the shortest and most comprehensive account of a good life ever put into words. It is too short for Dr. Cumming, and he adds to it thus :—" If Enoch thus walking in this right way, walked with God, he must have agreed with God. ' How can two walk together, unless they be agreed?' It is quite plain, then, that Enoch must have agreed with God in those great truths which were preached amidst the wrecks of Paradise, which were sealed by the sacrifice on the cross, which were announced in every language at the day of Pentecost ; which are expressed in our Bibles in letters that can never fade, and which are written in Christian hearts in characters that can never die." And so on for seven pages more, during which Enoch, among other experiences, " heard the oaths, and the curses, and the swearing of antediluvians," and " was shocked and terrified, and clung to God and prayed for protection." Surely the most rigidly orthodox may allow that this is watering the wine of the Word. How Dr. Cumming, who believes the place of Enoch in humanity to be almost unique, that he and one other only of mankind escaped the doom which, as he thinks, fell upon all else of Adam's seed, can have the courage to invent thoughts for him after this style is to us inconceivable. A man, however, who can say of Sarah that " hers was a life chequered more than ordi- narily," and speak of " the great transaction that was taking place between Moses, Aaron, and the Lord God of Israel," is capable of describing Enoch's walk and conversation in the style of a penny tract.
The explanations are even more wonderful than the additions. We say nothing of the new translations by which Dr. Cumming is accustomed to obviate every difficulty, hinting, for example, that Cain said, "My sin is greater than can be forgiven," instead of " My punishment is greater than I can bear," and positively asserting that a " not " has been left out in David's dying order about Shimei, the King having spoken nonsensically, instead of vengefully. He said, " Now therefore hold him not guiltless, and his hoar head bring not thou down to the grave with blood." We leave these points to those who have studied, as we have not, the Hebrew text, merely remarking that though we do .not know Hebrew, Solomon did, and that if Dr. Cumming is right Solomon disobeyed his father's last injunction. Dr. Cumming does not altogether shirk difficulties, but his way of getting over them is a little remarkable. He just invents a new revelation. For example, he says, in common with an old and most respectable school of commentators, that the Fall of Adam introduced physical death into the world. Clearly if it did, then Christ's sacrifice abolished physical death, for we can have no right to read, " as in Adam all die" of physical death, and" so in Christ shall all be made alive" of spiritual life, but that is not Dr. Cumming's difficulty. His puzzle is the megatherium. In his cosmogony that creature clearly was dead before Adam, and he cannot leave the mega- therium unaccounted for. So he observes in reply,— "Geology does not show death to have occurred in a single instance amongst the animals created during the first six days of crea- tion. All the animals that perished in those enormous masses seem to have belonged to a different climate, to a different condition of the globe, and to have been all of a more ancient period than those created during the six days before the crowning act of man's creation. We know from the sacred records that sin occurred in the prehistoric era, that is, long before the creation of man. Angels sinned. May not their sin have struck every creature existing in their era, and contemporary with them, and so have inflicted death on all connected with that dynasty? This assumes what the record almost implies, that angels originally dwelt on earth. This is a highly probable fact. If so, who knows the height and depth and extent to which this sin of theirs may have gone ? What havoc it may have brought upon creation all around them, bow high toward heaven it may have reached, how deep toward earth's centre it may have shot? Those subterranean traces of ruin, of disorganization, and of death, may be the issues of angels' sin long prior to Adam's creation, while the wrecks and death that we see now are proofs of only the transference, not of the first application, of a sentence, executed millions of years before, to a new dynasty introduced in new circumstances, and of which Adam was the federal head, who sinned and brought upon his race what angels brought upon theirs,—death, with all its bitterness and woe. If so, the sentence of death pronounced upon Adam on his Fall was not the creation of a new law, but the appli- cation of an old one; not the occurrence of a first fact, but the repeti- tion of a long prior existent fact.".
Just forget for a moment that this statement occurs in a sort of sermon, and consider it as an ordinary theory. First of all it is asserted that no animal of the kinds now existing perished more than six thousand years ago, and then we have a whole mythology, a history of the fall of the angels, all evolved from the depths of Dr. Cumming's moral conscious- ness, all without the shadow of justification, and all intended to account for 'the existence of the megatherium. What is the use of arguing with a man who meets a spiritual statement by a scientific difficulty, and then removes the difficulty by invent- ing a new mythologic history ? Or what can be the value of a history which, professing to be based upon a record, virtually interpolates into that record assumptions utterly at variance with its whole drift and meaning, and while accepting Scripture as divine, raises a purely human and baseless dream to a level with Scripture ? Surely the wild idea that the world was created with the fossils, &c., in it, as a temptation to the pride of intellect, is better than this. It is a monstrous theory, but at least it does explain the facts, which Dr. Cumming's dream does not.
And yet, as we said, this volume, with its false science, and pseudo- learning, and tinsel style,and childish paraphrases of simple narra- tive, will find a circle of readers wider than is given to the highest eloquence or the most vigorous thought. Why ? We cannot wholly explain the puzzle, any more than we can explain the suc- cess of Mr. Tupper, or the hold retained by the Scotch translation of the Psalms, but we can offer a reasonable suggestion. Dr. Cumming is one of the very few strictly orthodox preachers who condescends to speak so that his hearers can understand. He talks on theology as he would talk on law, or poetry, or agri- culture, or the management of bees. What he has to say is very poor, but he says it in English, and not in Pulpit. His style is bad enough, but it is bad as the style of the Telegraph is bad, and not as the style of a Papal commination is bad: The words are human, instead of pulpity, and people who are hungering for human words about theology, words with a meaning capable of definition, and intelligible to men and not to priests only, listen to him with a sense of relief. It is trying no doubt to have geology explained as the result of the fall for unknown reasons of unknown beings in unknown places, but then the regular preacher would not allude to geology at all, would go on serenely careless whether his audience had ever been in the Crystal Palace or not. Dr. Cumming is not careless. He is not learned enough, or humble enough, or painstaking enough to recon- cile Genesis and the Crystal Palace, but he does in some dim way perceive that they must be reconciled before the world can get on, and try in a feeble way to perform the necessary task. There is a lay element in him, visible in that suggestion about Cain, visible in his open dislike of denominational differences whenever Rome is not in question, visible in his abstinence from terrorism, visible most of all in the utterance which must terribly shock some of his
readers, the quietly dogmatic assertion that all children who die in infancy go to heaven. For that remark, which bespeaks a charity beyond his creed, a wisdom higher than that of his books, we may well pardon Dr. Cumming's merely literary sins, and only ask,—is it not barely possible that men in their relation to the Almighty die always in their infancy ?
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