The Press. — London, England, 1855-09-29 00:00:00

f i t tr a tu r t. 1. The War and its Issues. 2. The End. By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. London : Arthur Hall and Co. IN noticing any works by Dr. Cumming we are met by a difficulty at the outset. In what light are we to regard him? As an orthodox expounder of prophecy, or as a mere showy lecturer? Is he a thoughtful, learned divine, diligently seeking after truth, and earnestly studying his Bible to find it, or is he a kind of pulpit Barnum, solely anxious to collect a large audience, and to excite speculation and wonder among the crowd? His place is not yet fixed. He has been successful in obtain ing notoriety, but surely nut in establishing a solid reputation. As an author we can judge him only by his works ; and as in these we find an odd mixture of politics and prophecy, of news and divinity, we must claim to treat them rather more freely than we should care to do publications of a purely sacred cha- racter. Dr. Cumming is of opinion that the world is to terminate in ten years time from this date. With this conviction on his mind, he is continually looking about for signs of the end. He reads newspapers as he never read them before, believing that the facts they chronicle are " just Providence translating " prophecy into performance." — (" The End, ' 19) ) The daily newspaper is the best com mentary on revelation. " God writes the pro " phecy ; the journalist steps in, and, without " thinking of the prophecy, testifies its complete " and magnificent fulfilment."--(a) Again, " Providence is writing in the page of the " modern newspaper the fulfilment of an " eient apocalyptic predictions."—(lb. 176 ) Dr. Cumming is fond of that kind of stirring expression which friendly critics would term lucid and graphic, but which reminds us much more of the audacity of American metaphor. Great statesmen and generals think they are carrying out their own plans, while, in fact, " they are just stepping in to fill up the out " lines God has sketched, and moving on the " rails he has laid down."—(lb. 20.) This thought is presented to us in a variety of forms. The Chancellor of the Exchequer does not think that, in imposing new taxes to carry on the war, he is helping to falfil the prophecies of Ezekiel ; but Dr. Cumming knows it, and he tells us that he pays those war taxes " with the sustaining and consola• " tary thought that he is preparing the way " for the coming of our Lord and Saviour " Jesus Christ."—(/b. 85). The year 1865 is fixed as the period for the coming of our Lord, from a consideration of the dates in the Book of Daniel. The 1,260 years terminated, he supposes, in the great revolutionary convulsion of 1790 ; then thirty years more reached to the period when the Mahometan power, typified by the River Euphrates, began to disappear ; and forty five years more reach to 1865, or to what Dr. Cumming supposes to be the seventh thou sand year of the world. Ancient chronology is involved in so much difficulty that it would be out of place to discuss Dr. Cumming's hypothesis here. If he really believes the end to be so near as he assumes, we need not wonder at his anxious inquiry concerning the signs of the times. He lays much stress on the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters of Ezekiel. His key to their interpretation is, that by Rosh is meant Russia ; by Tubal, Tobolsk ; and by Mesheck, Muscovy ; the three names typifying the Russian empire. The veritable Gog is the Northern despot, the ambitious tyrant, the huge vulture, as the Reverend Doctor indiffe rently terms the Emperor of Russia for the time being. Then Gomer IS Germany, which is to make common cause with Russia ; and Tarshish is England, destined to play a great part in putting a hook into the jaws of Gog. (" The End," Lect. vii.) Gog may be checked for a time in his career of aggression ; but uAunately, and that before long, as the pro phecy is to be fulfilled in ten years, Gog will advance to Palestine, will be struck down at erusalem, tie Jews will be olleeted and THE PRESS. regain their Holy City, and the Millennium will commence. The vials of Revelation are interpreted with like boldness, and to the like conclusion. The first was poured out at the commencement of the revolutionary era in 1790 ; the second, poured out upon the sea, typified the destruc tive prowess of the British navy; the third signified the wars on the Danube, the Po, and the Rhine ; the fourth was directed against the imperial power of Napoleon, under figure of "the sun ;" the fifth annihilated the temporal power of the Popedom, " the seat of " the beast," when "the Pope was dragged at " the chariot-wheels of Napoleon, was taken "to Fontainebleau and made a prisoner, " treated as a puppet, the Emperor making " merry at his expense ;" the sixth, to dry up the River Euphrates, was poured out some years ago, but the effects are still in operation, the " Kings of the East " being, not the East India Company, as some commentators have supposed, but the Jews, and Armageddon being clearly Sebastopol, where the kings of the earth are to be gathered together to " the " battle of that great day of God Almighty ;" and the seventh and last vial was poured out in 1848, we being at this moment, without knowing it and without meaning it, preparing the way for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, and Great Babylon being " brought to remembrance " through the gigantic blunder of the Papal aggression of 1850. The devout and candid reader of the 16th chapter of Revelations will be very far from satisfied that this interpretation of it is natural or convincing, or even so much as plausible. The pouring out of the second vial, when "every living soul died in the sea," cannot by the most forced principle of interpretation signify the triumphs which secured to England the empire of the ocean; and though, in refer ence to the fourth vial, Dr. Cumming asserts that Napoleon was called by his soldiers " The " Little Sun," we suspect that his vivid imagi nation has deceived him, and that for the style he gives we should read, Little Corporal. Such theories of interpretation, however, should never be harshly judged nor rashly re jected. Very few persons can be competent judges of them, and common sense, our best guide in most cases, may fail us in attempting to fathom the depths of prophecy. But of the events of the time in which we live we can all form a fair judgment, and when Dr. Cumming points to them in support of his opinions we get out of the maze of theory into the plain paths of fact. We can judge, for instance, whether we are living in an age when terrible natural phenomena are peculiarly prevalent, and when we might expect, from what is pass ing around us, that the last days predicted in Scripture are at hand. Dr. Cumming furnishes us with the surer standard for estimating the truth of his ideas, as he is all for literal inter pretation. A remarkable prediction of the closing epoch found in Daniel is, he says, " Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge " shall be increased." The running to and fro he supposes to indicate railway travelling : Is not this the age of travelling—of excessive travelling —of unprecedented locomotion? Have not all calcula- tions been defied? Have not all expectations been agree- ably disappointed? Have not railways made travelling, as well as provided facilities for it?—End, 132. On the prophecy " Knowledge shall be " increased " the commentary is more copious:— A change has taken place amid the masses of mankind, immense and unmistakeable. Never was the spread of knowledge so earnest a pursuit ; never was the passion for it so ardent, enthusiastic, and universal. The folio that was of old written for the few is now expanded into tracts for the many. The libraries of Ptolemy, or of Alexandria, are now the circulating libraries in every neighbourhood. Systems of divinity and learning, that were once banked up in universities, have now burst their embankments, and millions slake their thirst where thousands sipped de- liciously before. if ever in any age, it is in the present, that knowledge has become almost universal. Here we have a fair example of that style of amplification in which it delights the Reverend Doctor to indulge. " The libraries of Ptolemy " and Alexandria are the circulating libraries "of every neighbourhood." Hardly yet ; but even were it so, we might reasonably doubt whether railway travelling and the multiplica tion of books were the proper fulfilment of the prophet's words. SATuaD4.y, One sign of the End is to be earthquakes in divers places, and Dr. Cumining, who appears to be indefatigable in his study of the news papers, collects a number of instances in which shocks have been felt with more or less of severity. At Turin the earth trembled—with out occasioning any damage, however —and the account given is set down as a witness to " the coincidence between God's word and " God's works":— I was awoke by hearing the jug and basin rattle, my bed shaking under me, and a noise like the door loudly banging to. Michael said "he was awoke with the house shaking much, and the bells ringing." A slight shock at New Zealand is noticed with like solemnity : The children screamed, the dogs barked, and they all rushed out of the house amid a shower of bricks from the chimney of the house, which had fallen. Several other shocks were felt during the night. The great convulsions which are to precede the End will most likely produce far more terrible effects than the rattling of a basin in a jug, or the barking of dogs. As the seventh vial was poured into the air, our commentator searches his newspaper for evidence of new forms of disease resulting from an altered state of the atmosphere. He adduces cholera as the most striking instance ; but cholera first appeared, if we recollect rightly, in 1817, and had manifested itself by terrible ravages in Asia and Europe long before that date of 1848 which Dr. Cumming fixes as the time for the pouring forth of the seventh vial. He notices also the potatoe disease, and the vine blight, as evidences that the solemn pre diction, " It is done," is in course of fulfilment. But the most singular instance of his credulitl —or of his presumption of the credulity of his readers—is found in his quoting a paper read at the Medical Society on the prevalence of carbuncles and boils, as another evidence of the miraculous interposition of the last and most terrible of the angels of wrath In our judgment, there is no surer way of casting contempt on prophecy than to dwarf its su blime and fearful announcements by applying them to phenomena of common occurrence and of trivial import. The most devout believer in the special action of Providence might hesitate to accept a carbuncle on his nose, or elsewhere, as proof that the end of the world was at hand. Dr. Cumming, one would think, might be taught modesty in his attempts to interpret prophecy by his failure when he seeks to trace the intention of Providence in the events before his eyes. One of his sermons in the volume on " The War " is upon the death of the Czar, which he assumes to have been providentially designed to prepare the way for peace : See if you cannot trace in this occurrence more than that impious thing accident. . . . . And whilst plenipotentiaries, great statesmen, are all met together, I dare say, with far more heavy hearts than any day-labourer ever feels who works his day, and earns his bread and sleeps sweetly—and whilst they are all per plexed whether peace be possible—whilst they are almost despairing or hoping against hope, the mysterious whis pering wire, the electric nerve of the air and of the earth, vibrates and transmits to the assembled Cabinet what seems a solution of all their difficulties, the end of all their care ; or, at all events, it tells them—" The Lord hath broken the staff of the ruler; he hath cast down the mighty from his seat." The singular coincidence of the event, with these remarkable efforts of the nations to seek peace ; the removal apparently of what was the great spring of all the bitter streams of war, seems to me so like the finger of God, that I pity you who call it accident ; T bless God that He has taught me to see in it the sweep of His own presence as He moves through the earth, to exalt and bless His own, and to cast down them that defy Him. His anticipations on other points prove to have been equally incorrect. The phraseology of the following is remarkable as proceeding from a Christian preacher : The inspection of that fleet that has gone to the Baltic, which many had the pleasure of seeing at a gala holiday at Spithead, is proof that no ordinary preparation is made; and on speaking to the officers on board of the Duke of Wellington, they said—when they were not expecting war— that, come war when it may please God to permit it, there will never have been a war like it in the whole history of the world before. Dr. Cumming's study of the newspapers has had some other effect on his mind than to en lighten him as to the daily fulfilment of pro phecy. It has animated him with that warlike spirit which our journals have breathed, so that we are sometimes in doubt whether the Doctor ought not to resign gown and bands kb. 932