'I, my Lord, am an integral part of the Church of Scotland, and of such integral parts, and of nothing else, is the body of this Church composed; nor do we look to the high places of the earth when we address ourselves to its adorable Head. The Earl of Kinnoul is not the Church, nor any of the other patrons in Scotland. Why, then, are these men suffered to exercise, and that so exclusively, one of the Church's most sacred privileges? You tell us of "existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests." Do we not know that the slave-holders, who have so long and so stubbornly withstood your Lordship's truly noble appeals in behalf of the African bondsman, have been employing an exactly similar language for the last fifty years; and that the onward progress of man to the high place which God has willed him to occupy has been impeded at every step by existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests?'
Bitter words, surely, all this for the ecclesiastical wirepullers of 1874, and inheritors of the policy of the Hopes and Muirs, when in approaching the Government with a statement of the intolerable strain of patronage, they tabled that same Letter to Brougham!
To the last, Miller clung to 'the Established principle.' This need not seem wonderful. The Free Church he regarded as the Church of Scotland in all but the state tie, the more so that the coercion by the civil courts had not failed to impress him with the conviction that the Headship, as stipulated for the Scottish Establishment by the Treaty of Union, though defeated by Bolingbroke and lost in the stagnation of the eighteenth century, had passed as an integral part of her constitution to the Free Church. The difficulty attaching to his position proved an unfortunate source of tension between him and some of the leaders, and to this was due that lamentable quarrel with Dr. Candlish which he carried to his grave, and which perhaps broke his heart, for he was what Lord Cockburn had called their mutual friend Murray Dunlop, 'the purest of all enthusiasts' and though Miller triumphed absolutely, yet it was not in human nature to forget that the attack was, however sincere, an attack upon cherished convictions.
There can be, therefore, no good now in minimising the fact that Dr. Candlish, in his zeal to secure a political and tempting opportunity against the Tory party, was led to enter on a quarrel with Miller. The action really amounted to a motion of no confidence in his editorial management. He proposed to centralise the Church press, and to secure the intrusion of a sub-editor on the existing staff, and the conversion of the paper into an explicit and active party organ. But by this time Miller had become one of the proprietors, by undertaking to pay back by instalments the thousand pounds advanced by Johnstone to the subscribers, with the interest, year by year, of the unpaid portion till the whole debt should be extinguished. The most objectionable feature was the proposal to secure the services of some smart Parliament House 'able editor.' The Witness had been accused of 'preferring Protestantism to Macaulay, and damaging the elections.' In this was shown the cloven foot, for it was an attempt to run the paper for the Whigs, and to render it the organ of the legal lights of the Parliament House in pursuit of official posts and spoil, of which Miller justly thought they had enough. Besides, the fall of a Government would mean the fall of that Government paper, and thus its influence as the organ of Free Churchmen would be damaged. Already the paper had parted with one of its best men who had been attracted to The Times, and in the whole scheme Miller saw 'a censorship; and the censor, assisted by the nice taste and tact of the Parliament House editor, is to be Dr. Candlish.' But, he asks, 'who was to control Dr. Candlish?' He could not see the paper jockeyed for a Government, and he stood aloof from 'Exhalations blown aslant, over the faces of even the Evangelical Churches, from the bogs and fens of a hollow Liberalism that professes to respect all religions, and believes none.' He felt that he had the people behind him, and 'possessing their confidence, I do not now feel justified in retiring from my post: Dr. Candlish and his Parliament House friends are not the ministers and people of the Free Church of Scotland—"of wiles, more inexpert, I boast not,"—the difference must either close entirely, or the people of Scotland must be made fully acquainted with the grounds on which it rests.' The unfortunate rupture closed by the very pointed question by Chalmers, 'Which of you could direct Hugh Miller?'
Meanwhile, in the Highlands and Islands, things were for a time going hard with the now disestablished Church. In some cases they had to preach 'where the snow was falling so heavily upon the people, that when it was over they could scarcely distinguish the congregation from the ground, except by their faces.' Baird of Cockburnspath had passed away in a room, 'a few inches above which were the slates of the roof, without any covering, and as white with hoar frost within as they were white with snow without. His very breath on the blankets was frozen as hard as the ice outside.' At Canonbie, Guthrie had passed Johnny Armstrong's Tower, and preached in wind and rain to a large congregation, 'old men, apparently near the grave, all wet and benumbed with the keen wind and cold rain.' In Cromarty, Miller's old friend Stewart was now preaching in the factory close, and there, in the summer of 1843, after a night of rain had swept the streets, his mind reverts to the congregations over Scotland in the open air—'I do begrudge the Moderates our snug, comfortable churches. I begrudge them my father's pew. It bears date 1741, and has been held by the family, through times of poverty and depression, a sort of memorial of better days, when we could afford getting a pew in the front gallery. But yonder it lies, empty within an empty church, a place for spiders to spin undisturbed, while all who should be occupying it take their places on stools and forms in the factory close.' The subtle mark of Scottish gentility in the allusion to the pew will not fail to strike the reader. Let it not be said that it savours of 'gigmanity'—in that standing bugbear of Carlyle!
In 1844 he set out on a geological ramble round the Hebrides in the floating manse, 'The Betsey,' by which the Church served the islands in the west, owing to the refusal of sites by Lord Macdonald and others. The yacht was but thirty feet by eleven, and there with his old Cromarty friend Swanson, the 'outed' minister of the Small Isles, he learned the hardships to which the miserable policy of the landlords had exposed the poor Highlanders. But if 'the earth was the lairds' and the fulness thereof,' the water was not! The building in which the congregation met was of turf—'the minister encased in his ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a genuine sou'wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped half a yard down his back; and I, closely wrapped up in my grey maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection, against the penetrating powers of a Hebridean drizzle.' In none of his works does he exhibit a happier descriptive view than in The Cruise of the Betsey, though in popularity it has been surpassed by his First Impressions of England, where he records the results of an eight weeks' tour, in 1845, from Newcastle to London, passing York, Birmingham, and Stratford on the way. In 1847 he published his Footprints of the Creator, in reply to the Vestiges by Robert Chambers, in which he seeks to controvert the theory of development, at least in the form in which it was then presented, by attempting to prove the fishes and the fossils of the Old Red to be as advanced in character as those now existing. A racy sketch on The Geology of the Bass formed part of a contribution to a work then issued, dealing with the history, botany, and zoology of the Bass Rock. The copyright of this he reserved with a view to its subsequent incorporation into a long-projected geological survey of Scotland. But this cherished idea he never lived to accomplish, though such a work from his hand would have been well-nigh final and perfect in its descriptive graces.
He was still in the enjoyment of his great physical power in spite of the severe strain to which his editorial and literary labours exposed him, added to as these were by his appearances in London and elsewhere as a public lecturer. As an exponent of science he could attract an audience in Exeter Hall of five thousand persons, whose attention he held to the close in spite of his northern accent; though perhaps this, like the Fifeshire speech of Chalmers and the Annandale tongue of Carlyle, may have given an extra charm to the individuality of the lecturer. The quarrel with Candlish had thinned the ranks of some of his friends, nor did he ever draw to the circle of Edinburgh as he had done to those in Cromarty. He was not to be easily got at by the eminent men who sought his acquaintance, yet it is with pleasure we catch occasional glimpses of him in the society of the best that either Edinburgh or London could produce. Stewart in Cromarty had passed away, in 1847, during the prosecution to him of a call to St. George's to succeed Candlish, who had been translated to the college chair left vacant by Chalmers. None of his friends were nearer to him than Mackgill-Crichton of Rankeillour in Fife, and there we find him one Christmas along with Sir David Brewster and Guthrie. Both Miller and his host were men of great physical powers, and—as Professor Masson notes—the geologist had a habit of estimating men by their physique. Crichton had narrated how he had started by the side of the mail coach as it passed his gates, and after a run of twenty miles he had been the first at the ferry. 'A horse could do more than either of you,' was the amused rejoinder of Brewster.
The issue of his Schools and Schoolmasters (1854), republished from the columns of his paper, brought him warm encomiums from Carlyle, Robert Chambers, and others. Miller in politics and other points differed strongly from Chambers, and of course at this time the secret of the authorship of the Vestiges had not been divulged. Yet beautifully does Chambers, to whom Scottish publishing and periodical literature owes so much, refer to the early days in Cromarty in comparison with his own struggles in Peebles. Readers who may have not quite forgiven some passages in Chambers's History of the Rebellion of 1745 will doubtless soften their asperity after reading Chambers's account of his struggling through a whole set of the Encyclopædia Britannica which he had in a lumber garret,—setting out at sixteen, 'as a bookseller with only my own small collection of books as a stock—not worth more than two pounds, I believe, quickly independent of all aid—not all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of self-reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, unamiable light, while my recollections of "honest poverty" may have made me too eager to attain and secure worldly prosperity. Had I possessed uncles such as yours, I might have been much the better of it through life.'
The close was cheered by the thought that he had fairly earned the admiration and confidence of his country. Yet nothing that could in any way fetter his editorial independence or freedom of action could he permit. When the money invested in The Witness was offered to him by Chalmers it was firmly declined, and the proposal to requite his services to the country by providing him with a residence he would not allow. 'I know,' he said, 'that as the defender of Free Church principles my intentions have been pure and loyal, but I am not quite sure I have been successful in doing the right thing, nor have I done anything that is worthy of such consideration from my friends. I believe my way is to make yet.' The same was his answer to a proposal to allow his name to stand for election as Lord Rector of Marischal College in Aberdeen; he met it pretty much in the vein of Carlyle at Edinburgh, when he felt that here was a generation in young Scotland rising up who seemed to say that he had not altogether, after a hard-spent day, been an unprofitable servant. Time had softened the ecclesiastical asperities of other years, and in 1853 Lord Dalhousie wrote to Lord Aberdeen to secure his election for the vacant Chair of Natural History in Edinburgh. But it fell to Edward Forbes. Again he was singled out by Lord Breadalbane, in 1855, and he was offered the post of Distributor of Stamps for Perthshire, an office which would to him have been a comfortable sinecure, securing alike competence and much leisure. For twenty-eight years Wordsworth in Westmoreland filled such a post, and Miller's banking experiences would have fitted him perfectly for it. But he felt that a man turned fifty could not take up a new vocation with success. That in this he was too modest there can be no doubt; but after a brief consideration he made up his mind to decline. 'I find,' he said, 'my memory not now so good as it was formerly. I forget things which I was wont to remember with ease. I am not clear, in such circumstances, about taking upon me any money responsibility.'
In fact, the long and severe strain of sixteen years had told. Of the extraordinary memory whose failure he regrets, Guthrie supplies a forcible example. In the shop of Johnstone the publisher a discussion turned on some debate in the Town Council, when Miller said it reminded him of a scene in Galt's Provost. He repeated the passage, halting at the speech of the convener of the trades, but was evidently vexed at the temporary breakdown. He got a copy from the front shop, and turned up the passage. Then they learned that, though it was fifteen years since last he had seen the book, he had repeated page after page verbatim.