human weakness and hypocrisy.  It is possible that Thackeray was her model, as his lecture was first delivered in 1851 or 1852; but, at least, she is not at all his inferior in power to lay bare the character and tendencies of the men she selected for analysis.  Her keen psychological insight was shown here in a manner as brilliant and as accurate as in any of her novels.  She may have done injustice to the circumstances under which these men were placed, their religious education, the social conditions which aided them in the pursuit of the lives they lived; and she may not have been quite ready enough to deal charitably with those who were blinded, as these men were, by all their surroundings and by whatever of culture they received; but she did see into the secret places of their lives, and laid bare the inner motives of their conduct.  It was because these men came before the world as its teachers, holding up before it a special ideal and motive for its guidance, that she criticised them.  In reality they were selfish, narrow, worldly; their teaching came from no deep convictions, nor from a high moral purpose; and hence her criticism.  She laid bare the shallowness of their thoughts, the selfishness of their purposes, and the spiritual unfruitfulness of their teachings.  Criticism so unsparing and so just, because based on the most searching insight into character and conduct, it would be difficult to find elsewhere.

Dr. Cumming’s mind is evidently not of the pietistic order.  There is not the slightest leaning towards mysticism in his Christianity—­no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the Father.  He is most at home in the forensic view of justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience.  He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with divine love.  He is at home in the external, the polemical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical.  The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with vindications of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the end.  He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an “infidel;” it is a favorite exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites and infidels are given over to gnashing