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.

    46/168 (page 42)
    la the picture of old ‘Jupiter’ there is something that recalls the belief of the erratic Lord Brougham, when he voted against the Veto Act and the right to protest against unsuitable presentees, from fear that it might end in ‘rejecting men too strict in morals and too diligent in duty to please our vitiated tastes!’ Carlyle’s Auto- biography is one of the most instructive of books; like the similar disclosure by Benvenuto Cellini, it is the presentation of a man who is destitute of a moral sense. Although in the pulpits of the metropolis Moderatism was but only too well represented, there were yet some striking exceptions. Sir Walter Scott, whose feelings led him strongly in the direction of the Latitudinarian party, has yet drawn in Guy Mannering an admirable sketch of Dr. John Erskine, the colleague of Principal Bobertson in the Greyfriars, and for long the leader of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. Some of the members of that party were gladly heard by Miller, but his greatest delight he confesses to have been in hearing the discourses of the old Seceder, Dr. Thomas M‘Crie. ‘ Be sure,’ said his uncles to him on leaving Cromarty, ‘ and go to hear M‘Crie.’ The doctor was no master of rhetoric or of pulpit eloquence, but the doctrine was the theology of the true descendant of the men of Drumclog and Bothwell. Nothing is more characteristic of the university system of Scotland than that the greatest ecclesiastical scholar she could produce was to be found in a humble seceding chapel at the foot of Carrubber’s Close. In Scotland, at least