DR M'COSH'S RECOLLECTIONS. 457 



Theory, and many other theories of Hume and Brown 

 as well ; and in brushing away them and some other 

 meagre or misty explanations by a few brief but cogent 

 facts and arguments. In his works he has combined, 

 as no working man ever did before, lofty speculation 

 with rigid science, and irradiated the whole with the 

 confiscations of poetry. Nor is it to be omitted that 

 there is a far more important point of difference between 

 the Ayrshire ploughman and the Cromarty mason. 

 Both were men of naturally strong passions ; but where 

 the one yielded to the temptations that assailed him, 



" And thoughtless follies laid him low, 

 And stained his name," 



the other resisted with all his might. As I conversed 

 with Hugh Miller, or after parting with him, with his 

 words of power still ringing in my ears, often have I 

 felt, and said too but not in his hearing "What an 

 amount of mischief would that mighty man have done 

 had he, say on his being tempted by his brother masons 

 at Niddry, given way where he stood firm ; had he, like 

 Burns, joined the foes of evangelical religion, instead of 

 becoming its defender ; or had he, when at one time 

 tempted to scepticism, abandoned the religion of the 

 Bible, with ' its grand central doctrine of the true hu- 

 manity and true Divinity of the adorable Saviour ' (to 

 use Miller's language), and gone after some plausible 

 form of nature- worship or man -worship." I feel as if 

 his country and his Church had not, when he was yet 

 alive, been sufficiently grateful to God for raising such 

 a man to guide aright so large a portion of the thinking 

 mind of Scotland at a most critical era in its history. 



' Every man in Scotland had heard of Hugh Miller. 

 Noble Lords were in the way of pointing their sentences 

 and securing a plaudit by an allusion to him. The artizan 



