John Cumming

John Cumming (1807-1881) must have been impressive in the pulpit. As a young man of twenty-four, while he was working as a private tutor, he was invited to preach a sermon at a small Presbyterian church, Crown Court at Covent Garden. This sermon so impressed the congregation that they asked Cumming to become their pastor, and he was duly ordained. He was to spend the rest of his career as the Crown Court pastor, but he had a reputation that extended far beyond his little London church.

Besides his preaching, Cumming was known for his good works and his bees. Under his leadership, Crown Court converted a nearby barn into a “ragged school” for indigent children, where children who would otherwise have been on the street were housed, fed, clothed, and educated. Some 16,000 children are said to have benefited. Besides caring for the poor, he was an avid bee-keeper, publishing a series of letters to The Times, signed “Beemaster,” which were later the basis for a book.

But it was his sermons and related writings that most impressed London. Cumming was a handsome man with a high forehead and dark, flashing eyes. His manner of delivery was dramatic. Tennyson parodies a preacher, said to be Cummings, in his poem, “Sea Dreams.” The preacher gestures dramatically, intones, “Thus, thus with great violence!” as he acts out the destructive deeds of an apocalyptic angel. The content of his sermons and his riveting performances helped to grow Crown Court into a congregation of 500. When the church building was being renovated in 1847, services were moved to Exeter Hall where crowds of up to 4,000 attended. The police were called in to assist with controlling the traffic at the end of these services.

As Tennyson's parody indicates, a favorite theme for Cummings was the end of the world. He wrote a series of books based on his reading of Genesis and Daniel showing that the world would end between 1848 and 1867.

Whether true or not, a story circulated that damaged Cumming's reputation as a believer in his own predictions. It was said that shortly before his 1867 deadline for the end of the world, he was busy negotiating a new twenty-one-year extension on his mortgage.

Cumming followed the 1867 disappointment with more books proclaiming that the end times were nigh, but his congregation gradually shrank until each Sunday he was delivering his sermons about the end times (and against Catholicism) to only fifty parishoners.

His grave site is one of the most neglected corners of Kensal Green Cemetary, where a dense stand of trees and ivy have grown up among the monuments. Navigating this area is hard, since the pathways that usually serve as reference points are completely overgrown. It seems as if the earth itself repudiates Reverend Cumming: The ivy covers headstones and gradually eats away at them. Now the stones are illegible. In a few centuries, they will be gone entirely. The trees, the mosquitos, the birds nesting above the vine-tangled ground all seem to say, We are still here.