The Daily Dispatch: December 11, 1865., [Electronic resource]

Rev. Dr. Cummings, a celebrated English divine, whose specialty has been, for a long time, "the end of the world," and who elicited some irreverent jesting by the discovery that he had leased a cottage for a term of years running a good deal beyond the date at which he had solemnly declared the world was coming to an end, has lately delivered a sermon on the death of Lord Palmerston, in which he eulogized in the most fervent strains the piety of that exemplary peer, and asserted that the aged saint had gone straight to paradise. This will be consoling news to the numerous friends and admirers of the devout and self-denying Premier, who was not more remarkable for his attainments in virtue than for the care with which he concealed them. In fact, so rigidly did he avoid all ostentation of personal religion, that no one knew he possessed a spark of it until Dr. Cummings announced it after his death. We dare say a good many censorious people, who had been in the habit of speaking of Palmerston as a hopeless old reprobate, hung their heads in shame when they discovered what a grievous mistake they had made, and how this heavenly-minded creature had been only affecting to be a gay old lark in order to veil from vulgar eyes the deep religious earnestness of his soul.

No one will accuse Dr. Cummings of pouring flattery from the pulpit into the dull, cold ear of death. He does not belong to the establishment, neither is he a Universalist, and cannot be expected to speak well of the dead without good cause, or in, any way, to encourage or patronize departed noblemen. He mentions, it is true, in his sermon, a little incident, which uncharitable persons will jump at, no doubt, as the solution of his extraordinary panegyric. He says that Palmerston had been one of his hearers, and spoke in warm terms of one of his sermons, and the preacher added, with charming modesty, that Palmerston was a good judge of sermons. We wonder if that particular sermon was the one in which Cummings, after leasing a cottage for twenty years, declared that the world was coming to an end in ten years. Whichever of his sermons it was, the good nature that could patiently sit under it for an hour, and praise it besides, was too good for this world, and richly deserved to be canonized.