Hugh Miller

nation was ridi

e's Ride,

s, the head of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a me

kingcraft which were to embroil the nation and drive his descendants from the throne. The preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible by the translators of 1611 shews the depth to which the Anglican clergy could sink. No wonder that James found such men ready tools to his hand. In their company he could complacently vapour about 'No bishop, no king,' or express his joy in finding himself for the first time in the company of 'holy and learned men

Mortality was what Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a presentation would be no less absurd than Hudibras would be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too much occupied with the external and material conditions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious necessity of materials in the romantic element of Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments were nourished by the almost entire lack of the political instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill Burton's History are not equal to the main body of his work; and, if the Lectures of Dean Stanley are the characteristically thin pr

m is so bigoted, and his Christianity so fierce, that he almost disgusts one with two very good things!' Christianity was then only a good thing when it had good things to offer to pluralists of the Warburtonian order. Yet these two garbled and distorted narratives are still the most widely known versions in England. Little wonder, therefore, is it that Carlyle should ask, 'I would fain know the hist

temporal as well as ecclesiastical resided in the Crown. So far did Cranmer carry out this idea that, regarding his own spiritual functions as having ceased with the death of Henry, he renewed his commission under Edward VI., and for mere denial of the Act of Supremacy More and Fisher were sent to the block. It is true that Elizabeth was induced to part with a good deal of this exaggerated prerogative, yet she still exercised such a domineering and inquisitorial power as threatened to unfrock any refractory creature of her creation. It was natural, therefore, that the church created almost exclusively by the will

hink themselves of resistance, and of texts that reminded them of the hammer of Jael and the dagger of Ehud no less than of the balm of the anointed of the Lord. History has repeated itself. The landed and clerical classes associated their triumph with the triumph of Episcopacy, and their humiliation with the triumph of the Independents. The exaltation of the prerogative, therefore, again made its appearance at the Restoration, to be shaken by the high-handed measures of James, and pass to extinction at the Revolution. The same thing has practically been seen in Spain. Spain, remarks Borrow, is not naturally a fanatical country. It was by humouring her pride only that she was induced to launch the Armada and waste her treasures in the wars of the Low Countries. But to the Spaniard, Catholicism was the mark of his own ascendency; it was the typification of his elevation over the Moor. The Most Catholic King was therefore flattered to exalt the claims of the Holy See no less than the English clergy had exalted the prerogative of the king. Far different the condition of affairs in Scotland. When Knox landed at Leith, in May 1559, he found the whole people ripe for a change, so that by August of next year the Scottish Parliament could pass a resolution to abolish the Papacy with the entire consen

lieving that the divine decree of election has singled out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. To the nation, and to the individual alike, regarding itself or himself as fellow-workers with God in the furtherance

idualists, the contention of the Scots was ever for a national system. This feature in the character 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 authoritative tones of the old; this, too, which explains how, outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dissenters in Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not sects. While the Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, the Burghers were all

igious colouring? One half of the statements of Hume and Robertson about fanaticism, austerity, gloom, enthusiasm, democracy, and popular ferocity, and all the bugbears of the writers so terribly 'at ease in Zion,' would be discounted by a simple regard for facts. When Leighton and Burnet went into the west in 1670 to try and induce the people to recognise the establishment of Charles, what did they find? Wranglings or harangues after the manner of Scott's Habbakuk Mucklewrath? 'The poor of the country,' says Burnet, 'came generally to hear us. We were amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be set to the power of the civil magistrate and princes in matters of religion: upon all these topics they had texts

d us to the real and the false in the national story. Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were the men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that sat in England's Long Parliament. The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness-these are the traditional marks of the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's perfervidum ingenium is surely much truer, and mere calculation is just what is not the national mark. If her poverty and pride were seen in Darien, no less truly was her religious and political side seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of persecution: nec tamen consumebatur. Perhaps, in the circumstances under which both king and country found themselves, no other compromise could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The election was left in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be approved of by the people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory phalanx-a danger to which every year subsequent has added but too evident a commentary-had exa

ougham this cardinal poi

ose, 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 discovered. 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

resbytery, so that during the protracted vacancy they drew the stipend. No actual case of intrusion, however, seems to have occurred until 1725, but the rise of moderatism[2] within the Church gave too frequent occasion for such forced presentations as, we have seen, took place at Nigg, in 1756,

which his own long régime had in no slight degree contributed. The Spaniard dates the decline and fall of his own country from the days of Philip II., segundo sin segundo, as Cervantes bitterly calls him, 'the second with (it was to be hoped) no successor.' Even in 1765, such had been the spread of religion outside the national establishment that the Assembly was forced to reckon with it. They found 'a hundred and twent

the average. We do not judge the provincial governors of Rome by such men as the occasional Cicero and Rutilius, but by the too frequent repetition of men like Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper reaches will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one now reads Home's Douglas. Young Norval has gone the way, as the critic says, of all waxworks, and curious is the fate of the great Blair: he lives not for the works upon which immortality was fondly staked, but for having given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh days. 'I have read them,' says Johnson of these sermons; 'they are sermones aurei ac auro

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s during this very year was reminded that it was his place to act and not to think, when the Alien and Traitorous Correspondence Act of 1793 and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794 had revived the worst of obsolete and feudal enactments, a wily use of this reign of terror was made to defeat missions by an attack on their supposed insidious and political designs. The lawyer who was afterwards to sit on the bench as Lord President Boyle, rose and said: 'The people meet under the pretext of spreading Christianity among the heathen. Observe, sir, they are affiliated, they have a common object, they correspond with each other, they look for assistance from foreign countries, in the very language of many of the seditious societies. Already, it is to be marked, they have a common fund. Where is the security that the money of this fund will not, as the reverend Principal [Hill of St. Andrews] said, be used for very different purposes? And as for those

cision of the House of Lords was to make people think upon Seafield's brutal jest about 'the end of an auld sang,' and Belhaven's trumpet-warning about the risks to the 'National Church founded on a rock, secured by a claim of right, descending into a plain upon a level with Jews and Papists.' There were limits even to the loyalty of the most faithful, and for ten weary years the conflict between the courts was to run its course. In 1842 the Church had instructed its Lord High Commissioner to lay before Her Majesty a series of resolu

ment, he said, of the constitution of the Church,-an infringement so great, that they could not constitute the Assembly without a violation of the Union between Church and State, as now authoritatively defined and declared. He was, therefore, compelled, he added, to protest against proceeding further, and, unfolding a document which he held in his hand, he read, in a slow and emphatic manner, the protest of the Church. For the first few seconds, the extreme anxiety to hear defeated its object,-the universal "hush, hush," occasioned considerably more noise than it allayed; but the momentary confusion was succeeded by the most unbroken silence; and the reader went on till the impressive close of the document, when he flung it down on the table of the House and solemnly departed. He was followed at a pace's distance by Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Gordon and Dr. Patrick M'Farlan immediately succeeded, and then the numerous sitters on the thickly occupied benches behind filed after them, in a long unbroken line, which for several minutes together continued to thread the p

and the Act of 1712 had rent the Church of Scotland. No other country had been so fortunately situated for the exemplification of an unbroken and a National Church. It was left to two Tory Governments to ruin it, but opportunities once lost may not thereafter be recovered. Under the long reign of Moderatism it looked as if the Nec tamen consumebatur were indeed to be a mockery. But the revival of national feeling at the beginning of the century, and the expression of popular rights in the Reform Bill of 1832, were waves that were destined to extend from the nation to the Church. The gr

ues 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 Scotland 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

lon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal Pirie of Aberdeen, survive like flies in amber only because it was their misfortune to be associated with great men. He might have said with Landor that he did not strive with these men, for certainly of them all 'none was worth his strife'; yet, though individually contemptible, they formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead resistance to argument and conviction. It was a time of great men. If Chalmers was the incarnation of the country and the movement, Murray Dunlop its jurist, C

1

ory, XX. 36-47, and Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, with the coins of James VI. stamped in 1570. Thus, while James VII.'s creatures, the Bishops, maintained the 'divine right

2

k Pattison's excellent paper in Essays and Reviews, '

3

utterance was William Howieson