But the tide was to turn. Years of dissatisfaction had at last produced the inevitable reaction, and in 1834 the General Assembly had bowed to the storm and passed the Veto Act. Then were discovered the evils of co-ordinate jurisdictions, the mistake committed in 1690 and 1707 by which no provision had been made for a line of clear demarcation between the ecclesiastical and civil courts, and the blunder committed in intrusting great questions affecting Scotland to the judgments of aliens in political sympathies. The tone of many a decision of the House of Lords was to make people think upon Seafield's brutal jest about 'the end of an auld sang,' and Belhaven's trumpet-warning about the risks to the 'National Church founded on a rock, secured by a claim of right, descending into a plain upon a level with Jews and Papists.' There were limits even to the loyalty of the most faithful, and for ten weary years the conflict between the courts was to run its course. In 1842 the Church had instructed its Lord High Commissioner to lay before Her Majesty a series of resolutions by which it was hoped that a rupture could be averted. On the 18th of May 1843 the Commissioner for the Crown was the Marquis of Bute, and after the levée in Holyrood Palace, the retiring Moderator, Dr. Welsh, preached in St. Giles, and in St. Andrew's Church the Assembly—the last Assembly of the real Church of Scotland—met. The scene so often described had best be given in Miller's own words, as at once affording a capital specimen of his editorial style and as the work of an eye-witness. We abridge from his leader of May 20:—

'The morning levée had been marked by an incident of a somewhat extraordinary nature, and which history, though in these days little disposed to mark prodigies and omens, will scarce fail to record. The crowd in the Chamber of Presence was very great, and there was, we believe, a considerable degree of confusion and pressure in consequence. Suddenly,—whether brushed by some passer by, jostled rudely aside, or merely affected by the tremor of the floor communicated to the partitioning, a large portrait of William the Third, that had held its place in Holyrood for nearly a century and a half, dropped heavily from the walls. "There," exclaimed a voice[3] from the crowd,—"there goes the Revolution Settlement." For hours before the meeting of Assembly, the galleries of St. Andrew's Church, with the space behind, railed off for the accommodation of office-bearers, not members, were crowded to suffocation, and a vast assemblage still continued to besiege the doors…. The Moderator rose and addressed the House in a few impressive sentences. There had been infringement, he said, of the constitution of the Church,—an infringement so great, that they could not constitute the Assembly without a violation of the Union between Church and State, as now authoritatively defined and declared. He was, therefore, compelled, he added, to protest against proceeding further, and, unfolding a document which he held in his hand, he read, in a slow and emphatic manner, the protest of the Church. For the first few seconds, the extreme anxiety to hear defeated its object,—the universal "hush, hush," occasioned considerably more noise than it allayed; but the momentary confusion was succeeded by the most unbroken silence; and the reader went on till the impressive close of the document, when he flung it down on the table of the House and solemnly departed. He was followed at a pace's distance by Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Gordon and Dr. Patrick M'Farlan immediately succeeded, and then the numerous sitters on the thickly occupied benches behind filed after them, in a long unbroken line, which for several minutes together continued to thread the passage to the eastern door, till at length only a blank space remained. As the well-known faces and forms of some of the ablest and most eminent men that ever adorned the Church of Scotland glided along in the current, to disappear from the courts of the State institution for ever, there rose a cheer from the galleries. At length, when the last of the withdrawing party had disappeared, there ran from bench to bench a hurried, broken whispering,—"How many? how many?"—"four hundred": The scene that followed we deemed one of the most striking of the day. The empty vacated benches stretched away from the Moderator's seat in the centre of the building, to the distant wall. There suddenly glided into the front rows a small party of men whom no one knew,—obscure, mediocre, blighted-looking men, that, contrasted with the well-known forms of our Chalmers and Gordons, Candlishes and Cunninghams, M'Farlans, Brewsters, and Dunlops, reminded one of the thin and blasted corn ears of Pharaoh's vision, and like them, too, seemed typical of a time of famine and destitution.'

'I am proud of my country, no other country in Europe could have done it,' said Lord Jeffrey. The Church had simply, in 1843, reverted to the precedents of 1560 and 1578, and had, in the simile of Goldsmith happily used by Miller on the occasion, returned like the hare to the spot from which it flew. Edinburgh, he maintained, had not seen such a day since the unrolling by Johnston of Warriston of the parchment in the Greyfriars'. There was a secession, not from the Church, but from the law courts, and temporary majorities of the Assembly. But the evil men do lives in brass after them, and the Act of 1712 had rent the Church of Scotland. No other country had been so fortunately situated for the exemplification of an unbroken and a National Church. It was left to two Tory Governments to ruin it, but opportunities once lost may not thereafter be recovered. Under the long reign of Moderatism it looked as if the Nec tamen consumebatur were indeed to be a mockery. But the revival of national feeling at the beginning of the century, and the expression of popular rights in the Reform Bill of 1832, were waves that were destined to extend from the nation to the Church. The great book of M'Crie in 1811 had truly been fruitful of results. For a century Moderatism had reigned on a lost sense of nationality. But, as for long the history of Rome had been written with a patrician bias and an uneasy remembrance of that figure of Tiberius Gracchus, so through the influence of M'Crie the figure of John Knox had again risen to popular consciousness in Scotland. There they could see a greater than the Boyles, the Hopes, the Kinnoulls, the Broughams, and the Aberdeens. Yet, till its publication, the face of M'Crie had been almost unknown upon the streets of Edinburgh.

And the Succession? Did it abide with the Free Church or the residuary Establishment? Lord Macaulay will show, in his speech in the House of Commons on July 9, 1845, what the violation of the Treaty of Union had effected in 1712, and that 'the church of Boston and Carstares was not the church of Bryce and Muir, but the church of Chalmers and Brewster.' No one knew that better than Hugh Miller, and no one had done more to make the issues plain to the people of Scotland. To him it was 'the good cause,' as Macaulay in his address to the Edinburgh electors had styled his own. While a plank remained, or a flag flew, by that it was his wish to be found. It was the cry which M'Crie had said, 'has not ceased to be heard in Scotland for nearly three hundred years.' From his first leader in The Witness, of January 15, 1840, to the close of his life in 1856, he was to send forth no other sound. 'Your handwriting did my heart good,' he writes in a letter before us, of 9th October 1840, to his friend Patrick Duff in Elgin, 'and reminded me of old times long before I became ill-natured or dreamed of hurting any one. I am now "fighting in the throng"—giving and taking many a blow. But I am taking all the care I can to strike only big wicked fellows, who lift hands against the Kirk, or oppress the poor man.'

Napoleon feared three papers more than ten thousand bayonets, and certainly Miller was a tower of strength not to be found in the adverse battalions. None of the merely 'able editors' of the Establishment party, much less the pamphleteers of the quality of Dean of Faculty Hope, could touch him or find a link in his armour. This was a tribute to character. The men of the opposition had 'nothing to draw with, and the well was deep'; and many names then blown far and wide by windy rumour, such as Dr. Cook, Robertson of Ellon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal Pirie of Aberdeen, survive like flies in amber only because it was their misfortune to be associated with great men. He might have said with Landor that he did not strive with these men, for certainly of them all 'none was worth his strife'; yet, though individually contemptible, they formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead resistance to argument and conviction. It was a time of great men. If Chalmers was the incarnation of the country and the movement, Murray Dunlop its jurist, Cunningham and Candlish its debaters, it was yet to the leaders in The Witness that the great mass of his countrymen looked for the opinions of Hugh Miller. His relative, Dr. Gustavus Aird of Creich, the late Moderator of the Free Church, has informed us that in his own parish he learned the paper was read out in the mill, and that in many places the same thing took place. It is well to have the ear of the country, and it was well at the critical hour that there was a man found who was heard gladly of the common people.

[1] ] For this important point in its bearing upon the position of the Cameronians, and the 'Testimony' of Richard Cameron at the market-place of Sanquhar, June 22, 1680, see Buchanan's History, XX. 36-47, and Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, with the coins of James VI. stamped in 1570. Thus, while James VII.'s creatures, the Bishops, maintained the 'divine right' of their creator, led by Paterson, the Archbishop of Glasgow, Dalrymple could carry the resolution on the constitutional question of tenure that the king had 'forfaulted the throne.'

[2] ] For the similar rise of the spirit in England see Mark Pattison's excellent paper in Essays and Reviews, 'Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750.

[3] ] The 'voice' of this now famous utterance was William Howieson Crauford, Esq. of Craufurdland.

CHAPTER IV

IN EDINBURGH—LAST YEARS