In Cromarty the cause of the Church was strong. Since the Revolution, the succession in the parish had been at once popular and able. The position taken up hitherto by Miller and his uncles had been a middle one. With strong hereditary attachment to the national establishment they united personal leanings which led them to a sympathy with the standpoint and the theology of the Seceders. But as yet Miller was, he says, 'thoroughly an Established man.' The revenues of the Church he regarded as the patrimony of the people; and he looked not unnaturally to a time 'when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end.' Still he confesses that as yet there were no signs of what he would himself have desired to see—a general and popular agitation against patronage—though he noted with approval the 'revival of the old spirit in the Church.' The time had, however, come when he could hesitate no longer. He saw with anxiety the decisions go against the Church in March 1838, and of the Lords in May 1839, the victory of his case by the presentee to Auchterarder, and the declaration of the illegality of the Veto Act of 1834. 'Now,' he says, 'I felt more deeply; and for at least one night—after reading the speech of Lord Brougham and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case—I slept none.' Could he not, he reasoned with himself, do something in the hour of danger to rescue the patrimony of his country out of the hands of an alien aristocracy, which since 1712 had obstinately set itself in hereditary opposition to the people? In the morning he wrote a letter addressed to Lord Brougham, the grandson of the historian Robertson, to which we shall have occasion later on to refer in detail. This admirable piece of reasoning and clever statement—the result of a week's work—was sent to Robert Paul, the manager of the Commercial Bank in Edinburgh. By him its value was quickly seen, and by the strenuous advice of Dr. Candlish it was at once put in print. Four editions in the course of well-nigh as many weeks proved its excellence; and it was fortunate enough to secure encomiums from two men so different in their leanings as Daniel O'Connell and Mr. Gladstone.
The writer who could at such a critical position produce a pamphlet of this nature was, of course, a marked man. The leaders of the Evangelical party of the Church in Edinburgh had been engaged in a scheme for the starting of a paper. From the press of the capital, and from such provincial organs as The Aberdeen Herald and The Constitutional, as edited by Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph Robertson, the 'travelled thane Athenian Aberdeen' who drifted into the Crimean War later on, and who drifted with the Parliament House party in a reactionary ecclesiastical policy at this time, had been content to draw such scanty information as he ever possessed on the real issues at stake in the Church of Scotland. Indeed, his lordship had gone so far as to taunt the Evangelical Party as composed but of the intellectual débris of the country, and of the 'wild men' in the Church. Sir Robert Peel, who really knew nothing of the intricacies of the question, was content to believe that there was a conspiracy to defeat the law and to rend the constitution. But the ignorance of the Premier and the taunt of Lord Aberdeen came but with an ill grace from them when flung against such men as Sir David Brewster, Chalmers, Welsh, Guthrie, Bonar, Duff, and Miller, and the whole intellectual force of the country at large. Indeed, to the very last, the indecision and the ignorance as to the state of the country shown by Lord Aberdeen were but the natural results of his holding his ecclesiastical conscience in fee from such men as Robertson of Ellon, Paull of Tullynessle, and Pirie of Dyce—these bucolic personages, 'like full-blown peony-roses glistening after a shower,' whose triple and conjunct capacity, joined to that of their master, might have been cut, to borrow the eulogy of Sir James Mackintosh upon Burke, out of the humblest of their rivals and never have been missed. It was really high time that something should be done, when Lord Medwyn could pose as an ecclesiastical scholar by a few garbled quotations from Beza, professing to set in their true light the views held by the Reformers upon patronage; and when these very extracts, together with the copious errors of the press, had been worked up by Robertson of Ellon to be quoted by Lord Aberdeen third-hand as an embodiment of oracular learning and wisdom!
No apology, therefore, need here be made for the inclusion of an extract from that remarkable work by Dr. William Alexander—Johnny Gibb—to which we have before had occasion to refer, and which must ever rank as the classic of the movement with which Miller's own name is associated. It deals with the sort of windy pabulum then served up by the Aberdeen papers to obscure the real issues, and it describes in the raciest and most mellow style of the lamented writer the meeting in the schoolhouse of Jonathan Tawse, at whose hospitable board are assembled the three farmers and the local doctor. Readers in the North of Scotland can from their own knowledge read much between the lines; and they will not forget that Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph Robertson were the only two men who could be found with effrontery sufficient to shake hands with Mr. Edwards in the all-too notorious induction at Marnoch.
'Jonathan took up an Aberdeen newspaper, wherein were recorded certain of the proceedings of the Evangelical ministers, who were visiting different parishes for the purpose of holding meetings. First he put on his "specs," and next he selected and read out several paragraphs, with such headings as "The schismatics in a——," "The fire-raisers in b——," and so on, winding up this part with the concluding words of one paragraph, which were these:—"So ended this compound of vain, false, and seditious statements on the position of the Church, and which must have been most offensive to every friend of truth, peace, or loyalty who heard it."
"I say Amen to ilka word o' that," said Dr. Drogemweal. "Sneevlin' hypocrites. That's your non-intrusion meetin's. It concerns every loyal subject to see them pitten doon."
'"Here's fat the editor says, in a weel-reason't, and vera calm an' temperate article," continued Jonathan—"he's speakin' o' the fire-raisers": "How much reliance could be placed on the kind of information communicated by these reverend gentlemen will be readily imagined by such of our readers as have read or listened to any of the harangues which the schismatics are so liberally dealing forth. If simple laymen, in pursuing objects of interest or of ambition, were to be guilty of half the misrepresentations of facts and concealment of the truth which are now, it would seem, thought not unbecoming on the part of Evangelical ministers, they would be justly scouted from society." "That's fat I ca' sen'in the airrow straucht to the mark."'
"Seerly," interposed Mains, who had been listening with much gravity.
"A weel-feather't shaft, tae," said Dr. Drogemweal.
'"An' it's perfectly true, ilka word o't. They're nae better o' the ae han' nor incendiaries, wan'erin' here an' there to raise strife amo' peaceable fowk; and syne their harangues—a clean perversion o' the constitutional law, an' veelint abuse o' the institutions o' the countra."'
How many specimens of that style of 'calm and temperate article' were produced in the North, no one with a recollection for either history or for humour need recall at this hour. Somewhat later, Miller could say in The Witness that in a few days he had clipped out of the papers what he had seen written against such a man of position and courtesy as Mr. Makgill Crichton of Rankeilour in the course of a fortnight. It amounted to eleven feet six inches when pieced together, and was for the most part gross abuse and vulgar personalities.