238 EDITOR. 



1 The ministers wanted power. They would like to put 

 down patrons with one hand, and to silence with the 

 other every luckless parson who did not vote in the 

 Presbytery and preach in the pulpit as the Evangelical 

 majority were pleased to dictate. Perhaps it was just as 

 well that the Court of Session should keep these petu- 

 lant little popes in their own place/ No man did so 

 much to dissipate these notions, so perilous to the move- 

 ment, as Hugh Miller. The Church of Scotland, he pro- 

 claimed, was standing once more, as she had so often 

 stood, on the side of the people, and he tore to shreds 

 the flimsy plea that the dogs, valiantly defending the fold, 

 had an eye only to their class interests. On the other 

 hand, his influence was mightily exerted to prevent the 

 mere ecclesiastical element from assuming that predom- 

 inance which many alleged to be the object of the whole 

 struggle. Hugh Miller felt with a depth and solemnity 

 of conviction which converted the feeling into a senti- 

 ment of duty, that the Witness was to be the organ of no 

 clerical party, the sounding-board of no Church Court, 

 but was to represent the movement in all the breadth 

 and independence of its national characteristics. 



He took no vulgarly practical, no merely political 

 or secular, view of the interests at stake in the Ten 

 Years' Conflict. His appreciation of the position and 

 claims of the Church was, in a strictly theological point 

 of view, masterly. He recurred, as we saw, to the first 

 Reformed Assembly of the Church of Scotland, its Book 

 of Discipline and Confession of Faith ; nor did he stop 

 there, but pressed onward until the principles which he 

 found in these instruments led him to ' the fundamental 

 ideaof all Revelation/ that, man's supreme allegiance being 

 due to God, the ultimate formula of freedom in relation 

 to his fellows, a formula which he is bound to enunciate 



