all
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 _a 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 politica