The hour, then, had come and the man. Miller was invited to Edinburgh to meet the leaders of the Evangelical party, and he was offered the position of editor of the newspaper, which started its first issue on January 15, 1840, appearing bi-weekly upon Wednesdays and Saturdays. At the end of the bank's financial year, he was presented by his fellow-townsmen with a breakfast service of plate, and the presence of his uncle Alexander was to Miller a circumstance of peculiar satisfaction. In a few days later he was seated at the editorial desk. For sixteen years he was with undiminished success to edit The Witness. But here we pause. The conflict in which he was to engage calls for a special chapter. The question has been approached from all sides, civil as well as ecclesiastical. But it is fitting that here, at least, an attempt be made to connect the struggle with the history and the peculiar mental and moral characteristics of the Scottish people. It will be seen that the question involves far-reaching, deep-rooted, and closely connected points of issue. It will therefore be the attempt of the next chapter to show the really national and democratic features of the conflict, and to briefly indicate how the civil and religious rights of the people, long before staked and won by the early Reformers, were again, when surrendered by an alien nobility, saved for them—from the point, at least, of abiding literature—by two men; who, sprung themselves from the people, the one the son of a Cromarty sailor and the other of an Aberdeenshire crofter, wrote the leaders in The Witness and Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk. The best years of Miller's own life, sixteen years of unceasing turmoil and overwork, were spent in making these issues abundantly clear to the people. No apology need then be made for an effort to reset these positions in their historical connection, and to exhibit the logical nexus of affairs from 1560 to 1843.

CHAPTER III

THE SCOTTISH CHURCH, 1560-1843—'THE WITNESS'

'The fate of a nation was riding that night.'

Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow.

When Andrew Melville said to King James VI., 'Sir, as divers times before have I told you, so now again must I tell you, there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland; there is King James, the head of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member,' he expressed what, from its foundation as an Establishment in 1560 till now, has been in every one of its constituent parts the belief and practice of the indomitable Kirk of Scotland.

These were words which the British Solomon was to remember. Over the border, where the obedient English clergy, who looked from the humblest curate to the highest dignitary to the throne alone for their support, professed to find in the pedantic pupil of the great Buchanan the wisdom of a present deity and regarded his slobbering utterances as 'the counsels of a god,' James found himself in more congenial society for the promulgation of his views on kingcraft which were to embroil the nation and drive his descendants from the throne. The preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible by the translators of 1611 shews the depth to which the Anglican clergy could sink. No wonder that James found such men ready tools to his hand. In their company he could complacently vapour about 'No bishop, no king,' or express his joy in finding himself for the first time in the company of 'holy and learned men.' When Melville, as professor of divinity at Sedan, was dying an exile in 1622 James was dismissing the two English houses of Parliament for what he was pleased to call an invasion of his prerogative; the rumours of the Spanish marriage were in the air, the first instalment of the royal legacy of kingcraft. 'No bishop, no king': The nation was to take him at his word, and to demonstrate pretty effectively that kingdoms can do without either—and both.

'Not a king—but a member;' 'in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil head supreme'—the whole history of Scotland was to run for three hundred years in these grooves. This is the doctrine which, from 1560 till now, has in Scotland been known as the Headship of Christ. Without a correct understanding of this question, not as a mere metaphysical or theological figment, but as a reality most vitally 'within practical politics' carrying effects direct and visible into every corner of the national life, the history of Scotland must of necessity be a sealed book—the play of Hamlet without the royal Dane. To the English reader this has been largely obscured, from the fact that the chief sources of information open to him are not such as present a rational or connected story. George Borrow found that Scott's caricature of Old Mortality was what Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a presentation would be no less absurd than Hudibras would be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too much occupied with the external and material conditions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious necessity of materials in the romantic element of Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments were nourished by the almost entire lack of the political instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill Burton's History are not equal to the main body of his work; and, if the Lectures of Dean Stanley are the characteristically thin production of one confessing to but a superficial knowledge of the vast literature of the field,' the Ecclesiastical History of Grub is only the work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of judgment and political insight appears on every page. 'It seems to me,' says Carlyle, 'hard measure that this Scottish man Knox, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world, intrinsically for having been, in such way as was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen'—harder still, say we, that the subject of Milton's great eulogy should be judged by minds of the notes-and-queries order, or by those of the class of Hume and Robertson, who have such a gentlemanly horror at everything that savours of enthusiasm as to miss the central point, the coincidence of civil and religious liberty.

'In every sense a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's.' Yet we find Hume writing to Robertson that if the divine were willing to give up his Mary, the philosopher was willing to give up his Charles, and there would at least be the joint pleasure of seeing John Knox made completely ridiculous. 'Who,' writes Robertson to Gibbon, 'is Mr. Hayley? His Whiggism is so bigoted, and his Christianity so fierce, that he almost disgusts one with two very good things!' Christianity was then only a good thing when it had good things to offer to pluralists of the Warburtonian order. Yet these two garbled and distorted narratives are still the most widely known versions in England. Little wonder, therefore, is it that Carlyle should ask, 'I would fain know the history of Scotland; who can tell it me? Robertson, say innumerable voices; Robertson, against the world. I open Robertson; and find there, through long ages too confused for narrative, a cunning answer and hypothesis—a scandalous chronicle (as for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but over light-headed; and Henry Darnley, a Booby who had fine legs. Thus is History written.'

In England, the Reformation took place in a way quite different from that in which it was effected in Scotland. The strong hand of Henry VIII. piloted the nation for a time through a crisis, and for a space at least it would appear that the nation was content to surrender its religious conscience into the hands of the king. He attempted, says Macaulay with perfect truth, to constitute an Anglican church differing from the Roman Catholic on the point of the Supremacy, and on that alone. There can be little doubt that to the court of Henry the king was the head of both church and state, and that the power of the keys temporal as well as ecclesiastical resided in the Crown. So far did Cranmer carry out this idea that, regarding his own spiritual functions as having ceased with the death of Henry, he renewed his commission under Edward VI., and for mere denial of the Act of Supremacy More and Fisher were sent to the block. It is true that Elizabeth was induced to part with a good deal of this exaggerated prerogative, yet she still exercised such a domineering and inquisitorial power as threatened to unfrock any refractory creature of her creation. It was natural, therefore, that the church created almost exclusively by the will of the Crown should for her rights and privileges rest entirely upon the Crown. The people had never been consulted in her creation, and it was to the Crown alone that the clergy could look. Her constitution, her traditions, and her government were all monarchical; and if, at first, she was moderate in her tone of adulation, it was easy to see that, led largely by interest, she would begin to assert the divine origin of the powers of the king, with the deduction of 'no bishop, no king' and of passive obedience, which made itself heard from the pulpits of Laud, Montagu, and Mainwaring, and in the treatise of Filmer.