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

SEPT. 29, 1855.

for plume and sword. As the Czar is Gog,
and foredoomed to wrath, the Doctor finds it
quite consistent with his Christian profession
to pummel him most unmercifully. We may
even fancy that he takes pleasure in thinking
that he is himself in his humble way contri-
buting to the fulfilment of prophecy by his
martial exhortations. It is thus that he ex
poses the designs of the " imperial robber,"
as Nicholas is mildly termed, at the com-
mencement of the war :

And what led to Russia taking up its present policy?
She too felt the shock, saw that the nations of the earth
were tossed and driven like leaves in the whirlwind; and
thinking France had more upon its hands than it
could manage; that Britain had just enough to do to
keep all its own under its sway ; that Austria and Germany
were too frightened to resist, said, " Now is the moment
fir me to carry on my mission—a mission begun and felt
a hundred years ago—and as I have appropriated Poland,
and absorbed the Danubian provinces, I will now seize
upon Constantinople, the ancient mistress of the East ;
with all the glorious traditions of a thousand years, with
its capacious harbours and noble seas; and having extir-
pated the Moslem, consecrated the Mosque into a Cathedral
again, and made St. Sophia the mother church of the
East, I will then take time to consider when and where I
may choose to descend like an Alpine avalanche upon
Britain, and teach her the duty and necessity of being
subjugated to the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Czar,
its representative head, and the necessity of humbly taking
up the position of a depressed and second-rate nation,
shorn of her ancient and traditional glory." Wo have
here the whole explanation and reason of the origin of the
Russian war.

There aro other passages in a like strain,
but more violent. Russia is represented as
being constrained to pursue her course of cri-
minal ambition, and as being the more guilty
for the very constraint. The true predestina-
rian never consigns sinners to perdition with
such fervent zeal as when he fancies that their
fate has been sealed from all eternity.
" Russia." writes the Doctor, " will eventually
" march through Europe, and sweep all before
" it, and finish its career where prophecy pre-
" dicts it will finish it—in the plains of Pales-
" tine, and in the great struggle that is to
" restore the Jew to his home." Ten years
are but a short period, according to human
probability, for the accomplishment of so vast
a " sweep."
Erratic divines have not unfrequently made
themselves conspicuous by their confident
announcements that the end of the world is at
hand, but few have carried out their notions
with such precise definition of prophecy as
marks the preaching of Dr. Cumming. In
one respect, however, he differs from the
fanatics of past times. While they acted on
their belief, the Doctor, prudent,in the midst of
his wildest speculations, declares that he shall
continue to act as though the world was
destined to last for ever. He will never
give occasion for any reproach of extravagance
in conduct. Were he quite sure that the
world was to end to-morrow, he would still
take or give a lease for ninety-nine years to-
day. When the End is visibly near, the soldier
must not " sell out," the captain must not
leave his deck, nor the tradesman his counter.
This " selling out" linage is a favorite with
our author. He says that when soldiers came
to John, questioning him " What shall we do ?"
he would, had they been sinners, have replied,
" Sell out instantly :

But did John say so ? He had good sense, and he had
inspired wisdom; and he therefore said to the soldiers—
not, Sell out, not, Leave your regiments, and join a cotton-
mill ; but he said—" Do violence to no man, and be con-
tent with your pay."

This vulgarising of the sentiment of Scrip-
ture, by appropriating it to party purposes of the
day, more resembles the manner of a negro
Methodist preacher than of a Scotch doctor
of divinity. " The captain on his deck" is
another expression we meet with so frequently,
that it led a punning friend of ours to remark,
that as the End was so near the captain would
be very fitly bedecked for sacrifice. Perhaps, as
" trifles light as air " are to the mind pre-
occupied with one idea "proofs strong as Holy
" Writ," and as in the last days there will be
Scoffers, Dr. Cumming may see in this critique
of ours a new evidence of the coming End,
hut other persons will rather take it as fore •
showing the end of Cumming. It is impos-
sible that the extravagance we find here can
have a lengthened reign. Following Carlyle,
the Doctor declares that the " age of shams is
" gone." We deny the assertion. It is pre-
sent. It. will last as long as the world. tis