HUGH MILLER 77 



of their own invention. There is something in the 

 Scottish intellect, in this resembling the French, that 

 seeks for the completest realisation in detail of its ideas. 

 As Professor Masson has said, its dominant note is 

 really not caution, with which it is so frequently credited, 

 but emphasis. While the English Independents during 

 the later years of the Civil War appear as either sectaries 

 or as individualists, the contention of the Scots was 

 ever for a national system. This feature in the char- 

 acter of the nation is really at the root of what Hallam 

 calls the * Presbyterian Hildebrandism ' of the elder 

 M'Crie. Johnson, too, could with some considerable 

 truth say to Boswell, * You are the only instance of a 

 Scotchman that I have known who did not at every other 

 sentence bring in some other Scotchman/ But this is the 

 very feature that Buckle has overlooked, and it is this 

 that explains how the new church spoke in the authori- 

 tative tones of the old ; this, too, which explains how, 

 outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dis- 

 senters in Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not 

 sects. While the Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, 

 the Burghers were all mere branches of the parent stock, 

 retaining in detail its fundamental nature in discipline 

 and worship, the established church in England finds it- 

 self face to face with organised and hostile dissent. So 

 entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland 

 that Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, 

 that while Presbyterianism is the national and the rational 

 dress of the land, Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which 



