248 t EDITOR. 



the Church, but over States and Nations in their charac- 

 ter as such.' His experience had made him acquainted 

 with secular voluntaryism rather than with the spiritual 

 voluntaryism represented by such men as Dr Heugh of 

 Glasgow and Dr Cairns of Berwick. According to these, 

 the principle of a free Church in a free State, with 

 clergy sustained by the free-will offerings of their flocks 

 on the apostolic model, affords amplest scope for the re- 

 cognition and performance, both by States and Churches, 

 of their duty to Christ as King, and is therefore in 

 strictest consonance with the spirit, if not with the 

 letter, of the old Scottish testimony. Be this as it may, 

 the fact must be clearly stated in a biography of Hugh 

 Miller, that, at the moment when he saw what he con- 

 sidered the infatuated policy of the State rending the 

 Church of Scotland asunder, he ' would fain press on 

 every member of the Free Church the great importance 

 of the Establishment principle.' 



By joining the Free Church, however, he declared in 

 the most forcible manner that the only Church, estab- 

 lished or disestablished, to which he could adhere was a 

 Church exercising every right of self-government. Un- 

 less ' the Establishment principle ' meant that the State 

 was to recognize and endow the Church, and the 

 Church to arrange her affairs and exercise her dis- 

 cipline in subjection to the law of Scripture alone, he 

 practically discarded it. All the rights of the Church 

 all that constituted her vitality as an institution had, 

 he held, been bought by Christ and had descended from 

 heaven. Speaking as a theologian and a Churchman, 

 John Henry Newman concentrated his rhetoric of con- 

 demnation, applied to the State-Church of England, into 

 the phrase, ' a mere national institution ; ' and Hugh 

 Miller, as he looked upon the spectacle of the Disrup- 



