Leading Articles on Various Subjects

by Hugh Miller

We must again express our regret that the article on the Duke of Buccleuch, which has proved the occasion of so much remark, spoken and written, should have ever appeared in our columns; and this, not, as the agent of the Duke asserts, because it has been exposed, but because of the unhappy unsolidity of its facts, and because of that diversion of the public attention which it has effected from cases such as those of Canobie and Wanlockhead, and from such a death-bed as that of the Rev. Mr. Innes. Our readers are already in possession of our explanation, and have seen it fully borne out by the incidental statement of Mr. Parker. We would crave leave to remind them that the Witness is now in the ninth year of its existence; and that during that time the Editor stated many facts, from his own observation, connected with the refusal of sites, and other matters of a similar character. He saw congregations worshipping on bare hill-sides in the Highlands of Sutherland, and on an oozy sea-beach on the coast of Lochiel; he sailed in the Free Church yacht the Betsey, and worshipped among the islanders of Eigg and of Skye. Nor did he shrink from very minutely describing what he had witnessed on these occasions, nor yet from denouncing the persecution that had thrust out some of the best men and best subjects of the country, to worship unsheltered amid bleak and desert wastes, or on the bare sea-shore.

And yet, of all the many facts which he thus communicated on his own authority, because resting on his own observation, not one of them has ever yet been disproved; nay, 246 scarce one of them has ever yet been so much as challenged.

Of course, in reference to the statements which he has had to make on the testimony of others, his position was necessarily different; and a very delicate matter he has sometimes found it to be, to deal with these statements. A desire, on the one hand, to expose to the wholesome breathings of public opinion whatever was really oppressive and unjust; a fear, on the other, lest he should compromise the general cause, or injure the character of his paper, by giving publicity to what either might not be true, or could not be proven to be true,––have often led him to retain communications beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding their real character and value. And such––with more, however, than the ordinary misgivings, and with an unfavourable opinion frankly and decidedly expressed––was the course which he took with the communicated article on the Duke of Buccleuch.

That the testing circumstance which did occur in the course of the long period during which it was thus held in retentis was not communicated to him, or to any other official connected with the Witness, he much regrets, but could not possibly help.

In the discussion on the Sites Bill of Wednesday last, the Honourable Fox Maule is made to say, that ‘the Witness contained many articles which had been condemned by the Church.’

Now this must be surely a misreport, as nothing could be more grossly incorrect than such a statement. The voice of the Free Church––that by which she condemns or approves––can be emitted through but her deliberative courts, and recorded in but the decisions of her solemn Assemblies. On the merits or demerits of the Witness, through these her only legitimate organs, she has not 247 yet spoken; and Mr. Maule is, we are sure, by far too intelligent a Churchman to mistake the voice of a mere political coterie, irritated mayhap by the loss of an election, for the solemn deliverance of a Church of Christ. With respect to his reported statement, to the effect that the Witness ‘contained many articles which had done great harm to the Free Church,’ the report may, we think, be quite correct. The Witness contained a good many articles on the special occasion when the Free Churchmen of Edinburgh conspired––‘ungratefully and dishonourably,’ as Mr. Maule must have deemed it––to eject a Whig Minister, and to place in his seat, as their representative, a shrewd citizen and honest man.

And these lucubrations accomplished, we daresay, their modicum of harm. With regard, however, to the articles of the Witness in general, we think we can confidently appeal in their behalf to such of our readers as perused them, not as they were garbled, misquoted, interpolated, and mis-represented by unscrupulous enemies, but as they were first given to the public from the pen of the Editor. Among these readers we reckon men of all classes, from the peer to the peasant––Conservative landowners, magistrates, merchants, ministers of the gospel. Dr. Chalmers was a reader of the Witness from its first commencement to his death; and he, perusing its editorial articles as they were originally written––not as they were garbled or interpolated in other prints––saw in them very little to blame.

Not but that some of our sentences look sufficiently formidable in extracts when twisted from their original meaning; and this, just as the Decalogue itself might be instanced as a code of licentiousness, violence, and immorality, were it to be exhibited in garbled quotations, divested of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:––‘It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of 248 the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the “bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris.” It has reminded them of the time when a “grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;” insinuating that, if they persisted in opposing the claims of the Free Church, a like fate might overtake the reigning dynasty of our time.’

When, asks the reader, did these most atrocious threats appear in the Witness?

They never, we reply, appeared in the Witness as threats at all. The one passage, almost in the language of Chateaubriand, was employed in an article in which we justified the sentence pronounced on the atheist Patterson. The other formed part of a purely historic reference––in an article on Puseyism, written ere the Free Church had any existence––to the Canterburianism of the times of Charles I., and the fate of that unhappy monarch. We thought not of threatening the aristocracy when quoting the one passage, nor yet of foreboding evil to the existing dynasty when writing the other. On exactly the same principle on which these passages have been instanced to our disadvantage, the description of the Holoptychius Nobilissimus, which appeared a few years ago in the Witness, might be paraded as a personal attack on Sir James Graham; and the remarks on the construction of the Pterichthys, as a gross libel on the Duke of Buccleuch. It is, we hold, not a little to the credit of the Witness, that, in order to blacken its character, means should be resorted to of a character so disreputable and dishonest. From truth and fair statement it has all to hope, and nothing to fear.