HUGH MILLER 93 



Tiberius Gracchus, so through the influence of M'Crie 

 the figure of John Knox had again risen to popular 

 consciousness in Scotland. There they could see a 

 greater than the Boyles, the Hopes, the Kinnoulls, the 

 Broughams, and the Aberdeens. Yet, till its publica- 

 tion, the face of M'Crie had been almost unknown 

 upon the streets of Edinburgh. 



And the Succession? Did it abide with the Free 

 Church or the residuary Establishment? Lord Macaulay 

 will show, in his speech in the House of Commons on 

 July 9, 1845, what the violation of the Treaty of Union 

 had effected in 1712, and that 'the church of Boston 

 and Carstares was not the church of Bryce and Muir, 

 but the church of Chalmers and Brewster.' No one 

 knew that better than Hugh Miller, and no one had 

 done more to make the issues plain to the people of 

 Scotland. To him it was ' the good cause,' as Macaulay 

 in his address to the Edinburgh electors had styled his 

 own. While a plank remained, or a flag flew, by that 

 it was his wish to be found. It was the cry which 

 M'Crie had said, ' has not ceased to be heard in Scot- 

 land for nearly three hundred years.' From his first 

 leader in The Witness^ of January 15, 1840, to the close 

 of his life in 1856, he was to send forth no other sound. 

 ' Your handwriting did my heart good,' he writes in a 

 letter before us, of Qth October 1840, to his friend 

 Patrick Duff in Elgin, ' and reminded me of old times 

 long before I became ill-natured or dreamed of hurting 

 any one. I am now " fighting in the throng " giving 



