The Essays of "George Eliot": CompleteEliot, George
History
The Essays of "George Eliot": Complete
Eliot, George
Literature -- History and criticism
“There are traits in the Christian character which the mere worldly
man cannot understand. He can understand the outward morality, but
he cannot understand the inner spring of it; he can understand
Dorcas’ liberality to the poor, but he cannot penetrate the ground of
Dorcas’ liberality. _Some men give to the poor because they are
ostentatious_, _or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge
their __neglect_; _but the Christian gives to the poor_, _not only
because he has sensibilities like other men_, but because inasmuch as
ye did it to the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”
Before entering on the more general question involved in these
quotations, we must point to the clauses we have marked with italics,
where Dr. Cumming appears to express sentiments which, we are happy to
think, are not shared by the majority of his brethren in the faith. Dr.
Cumming, it seems, is unable to conceive that the natural man can have
any other motive for being just and upright than that it is useless to be
otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable; according to
his experience, between the feelings of ostentation and selfish alarm and
the feeling of love to Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead
a man to relieve want. Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it
is Dr. Cumming’s exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather
than his sentiments themselves, still, the fact that the deficiency lies
precisely here, and that he can overlook it not only in the haste of oral
delivery but in the examination of proof-sheets, is strongly significant
of his mental bias—of the faint degree in which he sympathizes with the
disinterested elements of human feeling, and of the fact, which we are
about to dwell upon, that those feelings are totally absent from his
religious theory. Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in
fulminating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral
elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his
theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a perpetual
rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he
should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do
not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its
beauty or justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine,
pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and therefore
positively noxious. Dr. Cumming is fond of showing up the teaching of
Romanism, and accusing it of undermining true morality: it is time he
should be told that there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical
men, who hold precisely the same opinion of his own teaching—with this
difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of Satan, but
as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of
egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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