HUGH MILLER 105 



high places of the earth when we address ourselves to its 

 adorable Head. The Earl of Kinnoul is not the Church, 

 nor any of the other patrons in Scotland. Why, then, are 

 these men suffered to exercise, and that so exclusively, one 

 of the Church's most sacred privileges? You tell us of 

 " existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests." Do 

 we not know that the slave-holders, who have so long and 

 so stubbornly withstood your Lordship's truly noble appeals 

 in behalf of the African bondsman, have been employing an 

 exactly similar language for the last fifty years ; and that 

 the onward progress of man to the high place which God 

 has willed him to occupy has been impeded at every step 

 by existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests ?' 



Bitter words, surely, all this for the ecclesiastical wire- 

 pullers of 1874, and inheritors of the policy of the Hopes 

 and Muirs, when in approaching the Government with 

 a statement of the intolerable strain of patronage, they 

 tabled that same Letter to Brougham \ 



To the last, Miller clung to ' the Established prin- 

 ciple.' This need not seem wonderful. The Free 

 Church he regarded as the Church of Scotland in all 

 but the state tie, the more so that the coercion by the 

 civil courts had not failed to impress him with the con- 

 viction that the Headship, as stipulated for the Scottish 

 Establishment by the Treaty of Union, though de- 

 feated by Bolingbroke and lost in the stagnation of the 

 eighteenth century, had passed as an integral part of her 

 constitution to the Free Church. The difficulty attach- 

 ing to his position proved an unfortunate source of ten- 

 sion between him and some of the leaders, and to this 



