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 a great red dragon, and two thirds of mankind the victims—­the whole provided and got up by God for the edification of the saints?

She calls Dr. Cumming’s teachings “the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs.”  Then she deals with that belief in this trenchant fashion: 

Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the complete prevalence of such a theory.  Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth:  build walls around the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap.  But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the sympathetic feelings.  Benevolence and justice are strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into activity by their proper objects; pity is strong only because we are strongly impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent.  If the soothing or the succor be given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed ceases to be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of obedience, of self-interest, or vanity.  Accessory motives may aid in producing an action, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct motive; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the actions of accessory motives will be excluded.

In writing of Young she says,—­

The God of the Night Thoughts is simply Young himself “writ large”—­a didactic poet, who “lectures” mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, and expects the tribute of inexhaustible applause.  Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it.

She contrasts Young with Cowper, preferring the latter because he dwells more on the things of a common and simple life.