I
have never heard of him.'--'Nor Chalmers?' 'No, I do not know
him.'--'You have never read any books on evidence?' 'No, I have read
no such books.'--'Then, how do you know this book is true?' 'Know
it! Tell me that the Dee, the Clunie, and the Garrawalt, the streams
at my feet, do not run; that the winds do not sigh amid the gorges of
these blue hills; that the sun does not kindle the peaks of
Loch-na-Gar; tell me my heart does not beat, and I will believe you;
but do not tell me the Bible is not divine. I have found its truth
illuminating my footsteps; its consolations sustaining my heart. May
my tongue cleave to my mouth's roof and my right hand forget its
cunning, if I every deny what is my deepest inner experience, that
this blessed book is the book of God.'"--"Church Before the Flood,"
p. 35.

Dr. Cumming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presentation that we
find it impossible to gather whether he means to assert that this is what
a peasant on the mountains of Braemar _did_ say, or that it is what such
a peasant _would_ say: in the one case, the passage may be taken as a
measure of his truthfulness; in the other, of his judgment.

His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intuitive, like that
of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us ("Apoc. Sketches," p. 405)
that he has himself experienced what it is to have religious doubts. "I
was tainted while at the University by this spirit of scepticism. I
thought Christianity might not be true. The very possibility of its
being true was the thought I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience
could give me no peace till I had settled it. I read, and I read from
that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I am as
convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book is the book of God
as that I now address you." This experience, however, instead of
impressing on him the fact that doubt may be the stamp of a truth-loving
mind--that _sunt quibus non credidisse honor est_, _et fidei futurae
pignus_--seems to have produced precisely the contrary effect. It has
not enabled him even to conceive the condition of a mind "perplext in
faith but pure in deeds," craving light, yearning for a faith that will
harmonize and cherish its highest powers and aspirations, but unable to
find that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His own doubts apparently were
of a different kind. Nowhere in his page