Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

  • William Keith Leask
Date:
[pref. 1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    101/168 page 97
    and the belief had been that the conflict was a mere clerical striving for power. It remained for Miller to educate the party, and to such effect was this done that, while the non-intrusion petition to Parliament in 1839 from Edinburgh had borne but five thousand signa- tures, the number, says Robert Chambers, mounted in the first year of The WiUiess to thirteen thousand. It was clear to all Scotland that there was a new Richmond in the field. It is the more necessary to insist on this, because the clerical mind, which after Malebranche is too prone to see everything in itself and its own sur- roundings, has never fully confessed the services to the country of the layman. As Guthrie points out, a silence is maintained all through Buchanan’s Ten Years’ Conflict on Miller. This he regrets, not only on the ground that it would be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, but also for its missing the cardinal principle that at such a time the press and public meetings form the most influential of factors. This such a kindred spirit and public orator as Guthrie is quick to see, nor does he go beyond the facts of the case, or the judg- ment now of the country, in maintaining that ‘Miller did more than any dozen ecclesiastical leaders, and that, Chalmers excepted, he was the greatest of all the men of the Ten Years’ Conflict’ He certainly was no half advocate or mere ‘able editor ’ in the Carlylean phrase. If Chalmers, Candlish, and Cunningham were the leaders in the ecclesiastical courts, Murray Dunlop the jurist. Miller was the pen- G
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