The reader must have often remarked, in catalogues of the writings of great authors––such as Dr. Johnson, and the Rev. John Cumming, of the Scotch Church, London––that while some of the pieces are described as acknowledged, the genuineness of others is determined merely by internal evidence. We know, for instance, that the Doctor wrote the English Dictionary, not only because no other man in the world at the time could have written it, but also because he affixed his name to the title-page. We know, too, that he wrote some of the best of Lord Chatham’s earlier speeches, just because he said so, and pointed out the very garret in Fleet Street in which they had been written. But it is from other data we conclude that, during his period of obscurity and distress, he wrote prefaces for the Gentleman’s Magazine, for some six or seven years together,––data derived exclusively from a discriminating criticism; and his claim to the authorship of Taylor’s Sermons rests solely on the vigorous character of the thinking displayed in these compositions, and the marked peculiarities of their style. Now, in exactly the same way in which we know that Johnson wrote the speeches and the Dictionary, do we know that the Rev. John Cumming drew up an introductory essay to the liturgy of a Church that never knew of a liturgy, and that he occasionally contributes tales to morocco annuals, wonderful enough to excite the astonishment of ordinary readers. To these compositions he affixes his name,––a thing very few men would have the courage to do; and thus are we assured 152 of their authorship. But there are other compositions to which he does not affix his name, and it is from internal evidence alone that these can be adjudged to him: it is from internal evidence alone, for instance, that we can conclude him to be the author of the article on the Scottish Church question which has appeared in Fraser’s Magazine for the present month.

May we crave leave to direct the attention of the reader for a very few minutes to the grounds on which we decide? It is of importance, as Johnson says of Pope, that no part of so great a writer should be suffered to be lost, and a little harmless criticism may have the effect of sharpening the faculties.

There is a class of Scottish ministers in the present day, who, though they detest show and coxcombry, have yet a very decided leaning to the picturesque ceremonies of the Episcopal Church. They never weary of apologizing to our southern neighbours for what they term the baldness of our Presbyterian ritual, or in complaining of it to ourselves. It was no later than last Sunday that Dr. Muir sorrowed in his lecture over the ‘stinted arrangement in the Presbyterian service, that admits of no audible response from the people;’ and all his genteeler hearers, sympathizing with the worthy man, felt how pleasant a thing it would be were the congregation permitted to do for him in the church what the Rev. Mr. Macfarlane, erst of Stockbridge, does for him in the presbytery. Corporal Trim began one of his stories on one occasion, by declaring ‘that there was once an unfortunate king of Bohemia;’ and when Uncle Toby, interrupting him with a sigh, exclaimed, ‘Ah, Corporal Trim, and was he unfortunate?’ ‘Yes, your honour,’ readily replied Trim; ‘he had a great love of ships and seaports, and yet, as your honour knows, there was ne’er a ship nor a seaport in all his dominions.’ Now this semi-Episcopalian class are unfortunate after the manner of the 153 king of Bohemia. The objects of their desire lie far beyond the Presbyterian territories. They are restricted to one pulpit, they are limited to one dress; they have actually to read and preach from the same footboard; they are prohibited the glories of white muslin; liturgy have they none. No audible responses arise from the congregation; the precentor is silent, save when he sings; their churches are organless; and though they set themselves painfully to establish their claim to the succession apostolical, the Hon. Mr. Percevals of the Church which they love and admire see no proof in their evidence, and look down upon them as the mere preaching laymen of a sectarian corporation.

Thrice unfortunate men! What were the unhappinesses of the king of Bohemia, compared with the sorrows of these humble but rejected followers of Episcopacy!

Now, among this highly respectable but unhappy class, the Rev. John Cumming, of the Scotch Church, London, stands pre-eminent. So grieved was Queen Mary of England by the loss of Calais, that she alleged the very name of the place would be found written on her heart after her death. The words that have the best chance of being found inscribed on the heart of the Rev. Mr. Cumming are, bishop, liturgy, apostolical succession, burial service, organ, and surplice. The ideas attached to these vocables pervade his whole style, and form from their continual recurrence a characteristic portion of it. They tumble up and down in his mind like the pieces of painted glass in a kaleidoscope, and present themselves in new combinations at every turn. His last acknowledged composition was a wonderful tale which appeared in the Protestant Annual for the present year, and––strange subject for such a writer––it purported to be a Tale of the Covenant. Honest Peter Walker had told the same story, that of John Brown of Priesthill, about a century and a half ago; but there had been much left for Mr. Cumming to discover in it of which 154 the poor pedlar does not seem to have had the most distant conception.

Little did Peter know that John Brown’s favourite minister ‘held the sacred and apostolical succession of the Scottish priesthood.’ Little would he have thought of apologizing to the English reader for ‘the antique and ballad verses’ of our metrical version of the Psalms. Indeed, so devoid was he of learning, that he could scarce have valued at a sufficiently high rate the doctrines of Oxford; and so little gifted with taste, that he would have probably failed to appreciate the sublimities of Brady and Tate. Nor could Peter have known that the ‘liturgy of the heart’ was in the Covenanter’s cottage, and that the ‘litany’ of the spirit breathed from his evening devotions. But it is all known to the Rev. Mr. Cumming. He knows, too, that there were sufferings and privations endured by the persecuted Presbyterians of those days, of which writers of less ingenuity have no adequate conception; that they were forced to the wild hill-sides, where they could have no ‘organs,’ and compelled to bury their dead without the solemnities of the funeral service. Unhappy Covenanters! It is only now that your descendants are beginning to learn the extent of your miseries. Would that it had been your lot to live in the days of the Rev. John Cumming of the Scottish Church, London!

He would assuredly have procured for you the music-box of some wandering Italian, and gone away with you to the wilds to mingle exquisite melody with your devotions, qualifying with the sweetness of his tones the ‘antique and ballad’ rudeness of your psalms; nor would he have failed to furnish you with a liturgy, by means of which you could have interred your dead in decency. Had such been the arrangement, no after writer could have remarked, as the Rev. Mr. Cumming does now, that no ‘pealing organ’ mingled ‘its harmony of bass, tenor, treble, and soprano’ 155 when you sung, or have recorded the atrocious fact, that not only was John Brown of Priesthill shot by Claverhouse, but actually buried by his friends without the funeral service. And how striking and affecting an incident would it not form in the history of the persecution, could it now be told, that when surprised by the dragoons, the good Mr. Cumming fled over hill and hollow with the box on his back, turning the handle as he went, and urging his limbs to their utmost speed, lest the Episcopalian soldiery should bring him back and make him a bishop!

It is partly from the more than semi-Episcopalian character of this gentleman’s opinions, partly from the inimitable felicities of his style, and partly from one or two peculiar incidents in his history which lead to a particular tone of remark, that we infer him to be the writer of the article in Fraser.

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.