We must ask to be excused from attempting any analysis of Mr. Miller's character and genius, or any estimate of the distinguished services he has rendered to literature, science, and the Christian faith. His loss is too heavy a one,—his removal has come upon us too suddenly and too awfully for mind or hand to be steady enough for such a task. The voice of the public press has already told what a place he had won for himself in the admiration and affection of his countrymen; and for the delicate and tender way in which the manner of his departure has universally been alluded to, were we permitted to speak in the name of Mr. Miller's friends, we should express our deepest gratitude. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute that his brother journalists have rendered to the memory of one who was a laborer along with them in elevating the talent and tone of our newspaper literature.
As Free Churchmen, however, it would be unpardonable were we to omit all reference, at such a time as this, to what he did on behalf of the church of his adoption. Dr. Chalmers did not err when, self-oblivious, he spake of Mr. Miller, as he so often did, as the greatest Scotchman alive after Sir Walter Scott's death, and as the man who had done more than all others to defend and make popular throughout the country the non-intrusion cause. We know well what the mutual love and veneration was of those two great men for one another whilst living; and now that both are gone,—and hereafter we believe still more so than even now,—their two names will be intertwined in the grateful and admiring remembrance of the ministers and members of the Free Church. It was die high honor of the writer of these hurried lines to record the part taken by his venerated relative in that great ecclesiastical struggle which terminated in the Disruption. At that lime it was matter to him of great regret that, as his office was that of the biographer, and not of the historian, there did not occur those natural opportunities of speaking of the part taken by Mr. Miller in that struggle, of which he gladly would have availed himself. And he almost wishes now that he had violated what appeared to him to be his duty, in order to create such an opportunity. He feels as if in this he had done some injustice to the dead,—an injustice which it would gratify him beyond measure if he could now in any way repair, by expressing it as his own judgment, and the judgment of the vast body of his Church, that, next to the writings and actings of Dr. Chalmers, the leading articles of Mr. Miller in this journal did more than anything else to give the Free Church the place it holds in the affections of so many of our fellow-countrymen.
But Mr. Miller was far more than a Free Churchman, and did for the Christianity of his country and the world a far higher service than any which in that simple character and office was rendered by him. There was nothing in him of the spirit and temper of the sectarian. He breathed too broad an atmosphere to live and move within such narrow bounds. In the heat of the conflict there may have been too much occasionally of the partisan; and in the pleasure that the sweep and stroke of his intellectual tomahawk gave to him who wielded it, he may have forgotten at times the pain inflicted where it fell; but let his writings before and after the Disruption be now consulted, and it will be found that it was mainly because of his firm belief, whether right or wrong, that the interests of vital godliness were wrapped up in it, that he took his stand, and played his conspicuous part, in the ecclesiastical conflict. It is well known that for some time past,—for reasons to which it would be altogether unseasonable to allude,—he has ceased to take any active part in ecclesiastical affairs. He had retired even, in a great measure, from the field of general literature, to devote himself to the study of Geology. His past labors in this department,—enough to give him a high and honored place among its most distinguished cultivators,—he looked upon but as his training for the great life-work he had marked out for himself,—the full investigation and illustration of the Geology of Scotland. He had large materials already collected for this work; and it was his intention, after completing that volume which has happily been left in so finished a state, to set himself to their arrangement. The friends of science in many lands will mourn over the incompleted project which, however ably it may hereafter be accomplished by another, it were vain to hope shall ever be so accomplished as it should have been by one who united in himself the power of accurate observation, of logical deduction, of broad generalization, and of pictorial and poetic representation. But the friends of Christianity cannot regret, that since it was the mysterious decree of Heaven that he should prematurely fall,—his work as a pure Geologist not half done,—he should have been led aside by the publication of the Vestiges of Creation to that track of semi-theological, semi-scientific research to which his later studies and later writings have been devoted. That, as it now seems to us, was the great work which it was given him on earth to do,—to illustrate the perfect harmony of all that science tells us of the physical structure and history of our globe, with all that the Bible tells of the creation and government of this earth by and through Christ Jesus our Lord. The establishment and exhibition of that harmony was a task to which is it too much to say that there was no man living so competent as he? We leave it to the future to declare how much he has done by his writings to fulfil that task; but mourning, as we now can only do, over his sad and melancholy death,—to that very death, with all the tragic circumstances that surround it, we would point as the closing sacrifice offered on the altar of our faith. His very intellect, his reason,—God's most precious gift,—a gift dearer than life,—perished in the great endeavor to harmonize the works and word of the Eternal. A most inscrutable event, that such an intellect should have been suffered to go to wreck through too eager a prosecution of such a work. But amid the mystery, which we cannot penetrate, our love, and our veneration, and our gratitude, toward that so highly gifted and truly Christian man shall only grow the deeper because of the cloud and the whirlwind in which he has been borne off from our side.
On the 31st of December, two days after the obsequies had been performed, Dr. Hanna resumed the subject in the following elevated strain:
We have still but little heart to dilate on any political or literary topic. Our thoughts can dwell on but one thrice melancholy event. Need we name that event? Alas, no! It had occurred but a few hours when the tidings of it struck our city with stunning, stupefying, and deeply saddening blow. It has already thrilled our whole land; and is on its way, through a hundred channels, to the west, to the east, and to the south, carrying with it mourning and lamentation throughout the vast area which is covered by the language in which Hugh Miller wrote. Writing, as it were, amid the deep shadows of the funeral chamber, and brought in a manner into the very presence of the dead, we are made strongly to feel, and we daresay our readers to a large extent will feel, too, the nothingness of those discussions which usually occupy and engross men. The weightiest matter that ever occupied the wisdom of cabinet or the pen of journalist appears verily but fleeting and transitory, when brought thus into prominent contrast with the awful realities of human existence and destiny; and it is only when reflection shows us that these matters are yet parts of a grand Providential scheme, embracing man's happiness now, and entering deeply into the question of his future and eternal well-being, that we can see in them that amount of significance and importance which they really possess.
From the firmament of British literature and science a great light has departed. But yesterday we rejoiced in its beams, and now it has set all suddenly and forever; and to us there remains but the melancholy task of bewailing its departure, and tracing very hastily and imperfectly its track. The intellectual powers of Hugh Miller had certainly not declined. He was marked to the very last by that wonderful robustness of mind which had characterized him all through life. His sense was as manly, his judgment as sound and comprehensive, his penetration as discriminating and deep, his imagination as vigorous and bold, and his taste as pure and trusty, as they had ever been. The whole of his great powers were found working together up to the last week of his earthly career, with their usually calm, noiseless strength, and finely balanced and exquisitely toned harmony. We have evidence of this fact under his own hand in recent numbers of the Witness. His last two articles were, the one on Russia, and the other on our modern poets. The former,—that on the resources of the Russian empire,—is characterized by the same wide range of thinking, the same skill in analysis, and the same power of grouping and arranging details, and making them to throw light on some great principle, which usually marked and notified his hand when employed on such subjects. The latter,—that on the poets,—is rich and genial as usual, betokening a full and unclouded recollection of all his early reading in that department of our literature, abounding in the finest touches of pathos and beauty, and redolent with a most generous sympathy with kindred genius. It is not inconsistent with what we have now stated, and it is the fact, that latterly the inroads of disease, which had entrenched itself deeply in a constitution originally strong, and which kept steadily advancing upon the vital powers, had come so near the seat of the mind, that for short intervals the noble spirit was sadly beclouded, and its moral and intellectual action momentarily suspended. But, apart from this, there seemed ground to believe that there was yet before Mr. Miller much honorable and noble labor. The strong man, after all his tasks, appeared to be still strong. His powers were mellowing into richness and calm, matured strength; his conceptions of great principles were growing yet wider; his store of facts, literary as well as scientific, was accumulating with every busy and laborious year that passed over him; and there did seem ground to expect from his pen, unrivalled among his contemporaries in its exquisite purity and calm power, many a deep thoughted article, and many a profoundly reasoned and richly illustrated volume. We looked to him for the solution of many a dark question in science; and we certainly hoped, from that fine union of science and theology which dwelt in him above all men, for a yet fuller and more complete adjustment of the two great records of Creation,—that of the Rocks, and that of Moses. But alas! all these hopes have suddenly failed us. It seemed right otherwise to the Great Disposer of all. He has said to his faithful servant, "Enough."
Let us look back upon that work. We by no means aim at giving a calm, well weighed, and deeply pondered estimate of it, but only such a glance as the circumstances permit and require. His great and special work was his advocacy of the principles of the Free Church. Mr. Miller was par excellence the popular expounder and defender of these principles, whether in their embryotic state in the Non-Intrusion party, or as embodied in the fully developed and completely emancipated Free Protesting Church of Scotland. For this service, in connection with which he would have best liked to be remembered, as he best deserved it, he had unconsciously been undergoing a course of preparation even when a boy. He himself has told us with what eagerness he devoured, at that period of life, the legendary histories of Wallace and Bruce; and the occupation had its use. It gave him a capacity for admiring what was great though perilous in exploit, and for truly and largely sympathizing with what was patriotic and self-sacrificing in character; and so it created a groundwork for his own future thinking and acting. The admiration he then bore to these earliest of our "Scottish Worthies," who vindicated on Bannockburn, and kindred fields, Scotland's right to be an independent and free country, he afterwards transferred to our later "Worthies," whom he revered as greater still. Not that he ever lost his admiration of the former, or ceased to value the incalculable services they rendered to the Scottish nation; but that he regarded Knox and Melville as men occupying a yet higher platform,—as gifted with a yet deeper insight into their country's wants,—as, in short, carrying forward and consummating the glorious task which Wallace and Bruce had but begun. He saw that unless our reformers had come after our heroes, planting schools, founding colleges, and, above all, imparting to their countrymen a scriptural and rational faith, in vain had Bruce unsheathed his sword,—in vain had Wallace laid down his life. Wallace and Bruce had created an independent country; Knox and Melville had created an independent people. They were the creators of the Scottish nation,—the real enfranchisers of our people; and it was this that taught Mr. Miller to venerate these men so profoundly, and that made him in his inmost soul a devoted follower, and to the utmost extent of his great faculties a defender, of their cause. He was a soldier from love,—pure, heroic, chivalrous devotion soaring infinitely above the partisan. He saw that the Church of Scotland was the creator of the rights and privileges of the people of Scotland,—that she was the grand palladium of the country's liberties,—that while she stood an independent and free institution, the people stood an independent and free nation,—and that bonds to her meant slavery to them. Therefore did he gird on the sword when he saw peril gathering around her. The privileges,—the entire standing of the common people, as given them by the Reformation,—he saw to be in danger: he was "one of themselves;" and he felt and fought as if almost the quarrel had been a personal one, and the question at issue his own liberty or slavery. How richly equipped and nobly armed he came into the field, we need not here state. What fulness yet precision of ecclesiastical lore,—what strength and conclusiveness of argument,—what flashes of humor, wit, and sarcasm,—and in what a luminous yet profoundly philosophical light did he set the great principles involved in the controversy, making them patent in the very cottages of our land, and so fixing them in the understandings of the very humblest of our people, that they never afterwards could be either misunderstood or forgotten! It was thus that the way was prepared for the great result of the 18th of May, 1843.
Of Mr. Miller, as a man of science and a public journalist, we cannot speak at present at any length. In him the love of science was deeply seated and early developed. The first arena on which he appeared—obscure and humble as it was—afforded him special opportunities of initiating himself into what to him was then, and continued ever afterwards to be, a most fascinating study. The study of geology was eagerly prosecuted amid the multifarious duties, and during the brief pauses, of a busy life. Several original discoveries rewarded his patient and laborious investigations. He succeeded at length in placing his name in the first rank of British scientific thinkers and writers. His works are characterized by a fine union of strict science, classic diction, and enchanting description, which rises not unfrequently into the loftiest vein of poetry. The fruits of his researches were ever made to bear upon the defence and elucidation of the Oracles of Truth. Our common Christianity owes much to his pen. Viewing him as a journalist, Mr. Miller not only excelled in article writing,—the most difficult of all kinds of composition,—but, as will be generally admitted, he has introduced a new era into newspaper writing. If the moral tone of our newspaper press is higher now than it was twenty-five years ago, we have Mr. Miller in large degree to thank for it; and to him, too, is to be traced that purer style and more philosophic spirit which begins to be discernible in the columns of our public journals.
But the character in which his personal friends will deplore him most, and will most frequently recall his memory, will be that of the man. How meek and gentle he was!—how unpretending and modest, even as a very child!—how true and steady in friendship!—how wise and playful his mirth!—how ripened and chastened his wisdom!—how ready to counsel!—how willing to oblige!—how generous and large his sympathies! No little jealousies, no fretful envyings, had he! Even in opposition, how noble and manly was he: if a powerful, he was a fair and open antagonist; and whatever hard blows were dealt, they were dealt in his own journal. We have seen him in various moods and in all circumstances; but never did we hear him utter an unkind or disparaging word of man. He was, too, a sincere and humble Christian; and the lively faith which he cherished in the adorable Redeemer and his all-efficacious sacrifice, bore abundantly its good fruits in a life including no ordinary variety of condition and trial, and running on to such term as to make abundantly manifest what manner of man he was.
The article which follows is from the Edinburgh News. It is evidently from the pen of one who was intimately acquainted with Hugh Miller, and is worthy of attention, not only for its eloquent and discriminating notices of his works, but also for its statements respecting his great designs, never, alas, to be accomplished.