HUGH MILLER 83 



In Miller's Letter to Brougham this cardinal point of 

 1712 is made clear : 



1 Bolingbroke engaged in his deep-laid conspiracy against 

 the Protestant succession and our popular liberties ; and 

 again the law of patronage was established. But why 

 established ? Smollett would have told your Lordship of 

 the peculiarly sinister spirit which animated the last Parlia- 

 ment of Anne ; of feelings adverse to the cause of freedom 

 which prevailed among the people when it was chosen ; 

 and that the Act which re-established patronage was but 

 one of a series, all bearing on an object which the honest 

 Scotch member who signified his willingness to acquiesce 

 in one of those, on condition that it should be described 

 by its right name an Act for the Encouragement of 

 Immorality and Jacobitism in Scotland seems to have dis- 

 covered. Burnet is more decided. Instead of triumphing 

 on the occasion, he solemnly assures us that the thing was 

 done merely "to spite the Presbyterians, who, from the 

 beginning, had set it up as a principle that parishes had, from 

 warrants in Scripture, a right to choose their ministers," and 

 " who saw, with great alarm, the success of a motion made 

 on design to weaken and undermine their establishment" ; 

 and the good Sir Walter, notwithstanding all his Tory pre- 

 judices, is quite as candid. The law which re-established 

 patronage in Scotland which has rendered Christianity 

 inefficient in well-nigh half her parishes, which has sepa- 

 rated some of her better clergymen from her Church, and 

 many of her better people from her clergymen, the law 

 through which Robertson ruled in the General Assembly, 

 and which Brougham has eulogised in the House of 

 Lords, that identical law formed, in its first enactment, no 



