own case, but expresses the opinion that perhaps no writer of the present day has done so much to encourage struggling talent as that gentleman. This opinion is one which, we believe, will be endorsed by all who know anything of the genial and benevolent nature of that accomplished man. Some local squibs, written in defence of his favourite minister, Mr. Stewart, who had refused to subordinate his sacramental services to the orgies of a coronation-day, procured Hugh Miller a gentle reprimand from the bank authorities in Edinburgh. This attempt at dictation on the part of the bank, in a matter with which they might seem, on the first blush of the thing, to have no concern, we might be disposed to class in the same category with the dictation to Burns by the excise authorities; but a moment's reflection will show, that, without particularly blaming Hugh Miller, with whom, probably, the offence was a sin of ignorance, his superiors were substantially in the right. The Commercial Bank was meant on its establishment to be quite distinct in its character from the then existing banks, which were all of them political engines. Speaking of their directorates, Lord Cockburn says:-"They were made up of respectable men, but without any talent or general knowledge, and the conspicuous sycophants of existing power." Excluding politics from its trade, the Commercial could not well, in consistency with its character, especially at that early period when party feeling ran so high, even seem to violate its fundamental principle. The reprimand, how

ever, we have said was a slight one, and Mr. Ross, his superior in Cromarty, made it still more mild. Gradually, however, was Hugh Miller drawn into the vortex of a controversy unspeakably more important than any merely local squabble. The battle between the Scottish Church and the Imperial Parliament had convulsed Scotland; Hugh Miller caught the contagion, and plunged with all the earnestness and all the energy of his nature into the thick of the combat.

Though under somewhat modified forms, this battle was essentially the same as that in which the Church of Scotland was engaged, almost from her earliest settlement; it is therefore important that we pause here to take a brief retrospect of the conflicts of the Scottish Church.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHURCH AND STATE.

NOTHING has so much tended to complicate all ecclesiastical movements in Scotland, as the circumstance that the exact relations of the Scottish Kirk have never been accurately defined. The Reformation was consummated during the minority of Mary. When the Scottish queen came from France to Scotland to ascend the throne of her ancestors-apt pupil of the wily Cardinal of Lorraine-she took good care to legalise as little as possible of the doings of the reformers. The voice of the nation was too decidedly in their favour to allow even the queen to set herself in open opposition to what had been done. In these circumstances she very naturally resorted to what is, on almost all occasions, the strategy of the weak-dissembling. When Mary had abdicated the throne, and James VI. reigned in her stead, that amalgam of the pedant and the tyrant, though he blessed God that the Scottish Kirk was the purest kirk in Christendom, did not, on that account, leave it to manage its own affairs. It is probable the vain-glorious monarch imagined, that for much of its purity it was indebted to the circumstance

H

that he deigned to lift upon it the light of the royal countenance. And despite his eulogium, no sooner had James succeeded to the throne of " that bright occidental star," Elizabeth, than getting enamoured with the smooth ways of England's bishops, the vigorous selfassertion of the Scottish presbyters became odious in his eyes, and the famous Hampton Court conference was held, to convince Andrew Melville and his coadjutors how antiquated and unscriptural were their ideas. The Scottish clergy, who had been summoned before the king, were a set of stubborn republicans: neither crown nor crosier could induce them to swerve from the simplicity of presbyterial order. The routine and pompous ceremonial of Episcopacy only served as a theme for the satire of the intrepid rector of the university of Glasgow; and after enduring the most humiliating discomfiture, James was obliged to let go the Scottish presbyters, without the gratification of a solitary conversion. Episcopacy being deemed a more pleasant form of faith than the Presbytery, the great object of the Stuarts was to upset, as best they might, the Presbyterian Church. So long as James VI. lived, the scheme was pursued with something like respect for the predilections, and something like consideration for the prejudices of the nation. But, from the moment that his son Charles ascended the throne, the scheme of amalgamation or assimilation was pursued with a hot haste that indicated an utter disregard of the feelings of the country. Happily, Jenny Geddes's cutty-stool cut

short the monarch's magnificent plan.

"Thou foul

loon, wilt thou daur say mass at my lug?" gathered up into a single sentence a nation's idea of Episcopacy. Jenny's stool proved the tocsin which summoned the nation to the conflict with its ancient kings. How that struggle was fought out, need not be here recapitulated. The story of the whole iliad of woes through which the nation passed, is "familiar in our mouths as household words."

At the Revolution Settlement, unfortunately, what was only a drawn battle was veiled under the semblance of a triumph. The party was undoubtedly defeated who had sought to trample in the dust the "standard of Zion," but the principles of the martyr-heroes did not receive that sanction and that prominence which they were entitled to receive. William, with none of the bigot's zeal which induced his father-in-law, James VII., to forego, as the French sarcastically expressed it, "three kingdoms for a mass," had all the love of power which characterized the Stuarts; and he, more than any other British monarch, is the father of Erastianism in the Scottish Church. Diplomacy did much during his reign to bring to reason the Scottish clergy; and the spirit and temper which William managed to introduce into the Church, rendered the encroachments upon her liberties, which took place under a subsequent sovereign, capable of comparatively easy accomplishment. The Revolution Settlement brought indeed peace, but it did not bring liberty to the Scottish Church. Her