48 FAMOUS SCOTS 



complaining the picture of meek and mute suffering. 

 I am a Protestant and dislike image-worship, yet never 

 can I get that statue out of my mind.' This, then, to 

 Miller formed the 'central sun' 'the Word made 

 flesh ; ' not merely as a received mental doctrine, but as 

 a fact laid hold of, and round which other facts find 

 their true position and explanation. 'There maybe,' 

 he allows, 'men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy 

 of constitution, are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere 

 abstract God, unseen and unconceivable ; though, as 

 shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost 

 all that has been said and written on the subject, the 

 feeling in its true form must be a very rare and excep- 

 tional one. In all my experience of men I never 

 knew a genuine instance of it. The love of an abstract 

 God seems to be as little natural to the ordinary human 

 constitution as the love of an abstract sun or planet.' 



No less interesting are his arguments from the 

 geological position. It was a difficulty which had long 

 lain heavy on the mind of Byron when, the reader may 

 remember, in his last days in 1823 he beat over much 

 theological and metaphysical jungle with the Scottish 

 doctor Kennedy the greatness of the universe and 

 the littleness of the paragon of animals man, and the 

 consequent difficulty of satisfactorily allowing a re- 

 demptive movement in Heaven for man in all his petty 

 weakness. Pascal had attempted to meet this by what 

 Hallam calls 'a magnificent lamentation' and by a 

 metaphysical subtlety, reasoning from this very small- 



