CHAPTER XI.

POPULAR DISTRUST.

Such, then, were the powers, the tastes, and the temper of the man the non-intrusion leaders selected to popularise their movement among the people of Scotland. Hitherto, despite their utmost efforts to dislodge from the popular mind all suspicion of sinister aims, they continued to be everywhere looked upon with the greatest distrust. Their zeal for the people's rights, it was feared, only veiled the intrigues of priestly ambition. Never before had a nation been so disposed to accept as accurate Milton's aphorism,-"New presbyter is old priest writ large." What the state of feeling among the community generally was, even after seven years' agitation, down to almost the very hour the Witness took the field, may be gathered from the following passage in a private note, addressed by Hugh Miller to Mr. Paul, Edinburgh, in 1839, when forwarding to him from Cromarty the manuscript of his letter to Lord Brougham:-"The question which at present agitates the country is a vital one, and unless the people can be roused to take part in it (and they seem wofully indifferent as yet) the worst must inevi

tably prevail." That was a modest, and, as the sequel has shown, a not ill-grounded hope, to which in the same letter the writer ventured to give expression in these words "The people may perhaps listen to one of their own body who combines the principles of the old with the opinions of the modern Whig; and who, though he feels strongly upon the question, has no secular interest involved in it." Mainly to the establishment of the Witness may be attributed the rapid awakening of the people of Scotland to the real import of the non-intrusion controversy, by which the years 1840 and 1841 were so peculiarly distinguished. Even so late as 1839, Dr. George Cook could state, without fear of contradiction, that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach, without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the non-intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the Church courts.

Nor are the concurrent testimonies of a sanguine non-intrusionist and a veteran moderate the only sources from which we are left to form our opinion of the true state of public sentiment at this critical juncture. The Veto act was passed in 1834. The decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case was given in 1839. During all the intervening years, petitions in favour of the independence of the Church had been presented to Parliament; but the paucity of the signatures obtained had been most marked. Even in the metropolis of Scotland, the chosen home of the nonintrusion leaders, the scene of the labours of Chalmers

and Welsh, Gordon and Cunningham, Candlish and Begg, not more than from 4000 to 5000 was the average number of signatures these petitions received. The appeals of an eloquence such as had not been heard in the assemblies of the Scottish Church since the days of Knox and Henderson, so far from setting the soul of the nation on fire, had proved but as water spilt upon the ground. To their dubious antecedents did these orators owe the scepticism with which their efforts on behalf of spiritual independence were almost everywhere received. People had a difficulty in believing men the sincere friends of sacred liberty, who so very recently were such indifferent friends to civil freedom. It was peculiarly fortunate for this party, that the editor of the Witness was above suspicion; no souvenirs of a sinister career were associated with his name, or beclouded his character. His antecedents were hostages for his perfect independence. The result of his labours in dispelling the distrust with which nonintrusion principles had been hitherto viewed, was apparent in the fact, that in 1840, the first year of the existence of the Witness, the petition sent from Edinburgh to Parliament, in their behalf, contained some 13,000 signatures, being more than double the number a kindred petition had obtained in the previous year. Already had the Witness disabused a large section of the public of the fatal suspicion that it was for clerical power, not popular rights, the non-intrusion leaders so earnestly contended.

Nor while thus eminently successful in his peculiar mission as an ecclesiastical polemic, was it merely from his efforts as a controvertist that his countrymen were left to gather their impression of his powers. It is seldom, indeed, that a man of high faculty is not also many-sided. The old divines were wont to represent man as a microcosm of the universe; and it would seem that, just in proportion to his intellectual development, is the degree of ease with which he intermeddles with all knowledge.

Whether in science, literature, or criticism, Hugh Miller seemed equally at home. From out the stormy arena of ecclesiastical controversy, he turned at will into the peaceful region of æsthetics. With nature's self an old acquaintance, we are not surprised to find him, even so early as the second month of his connection with the Witness, indulging his readers with certain glorious recollections of the beautiful and the sublime, awakened by the contemplation of the triumphs of art in the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy. Few first visits to that exhibition ever produced such "criticism for the uninitiated" as this delicately beautiful description of a northern dell suggested to Hugh Miller while lingering in the presence, and under the spell of one of the richest landscapes of the exhibition:

:

"In this solitary dell the banks, which, on either hand, at every angle and indentation, advance their grassy ridges, or retire in long sloping hollows, partake perhaps rather of the picturesque than of the magnificent; but the trees which rise along their sides, and, which

for the last century have been slowly lifting themselves to the freer air of the upper region, look down from more than the higher altitude instanced by Rousseau. Often when the evening sun was casting its slant red beams athwart their topmost branches, and all beneath was brown in the shade, we have sauntered along this little stream, lost in delicious musings, whose intermingled train of thought and feeling we have no language to convey. We have felt that the cogitative faculty in these woods had not much of activity; but then, though it wrought slowly, it wrought willingly and unbidden; and around, every minute thing would swell and expand an atmosphere of delightful feeling, which somehow seemed to owe its origin as much to the magnitude as to the quiet beauty of the surrounding objects; and which has reminded us fancifully, but strongly, of the minutest of all the planets-of the asteroids rather-whose atmosphere rises over it more than ten times the height of the atmosphere of our own planet. We have looked up to the branches that twisted and interlaced themselves so high over our head, and the leaves that seemed sleeping in the light; we have seen the deep blue sky far beyond; we have caught glimpses through the chance vistas of little open spaces, shaggy with a rank vegetation, and which we have loved to deem the haunts of a solitude still deeper than that which surrounded us; we have marked the varieties of beauty which distinguish the several denizens of the forest the ash with his long massy arms that shoot off from the trunk at such acute angles, and his sooty blossoms spread over him as if he were mourning the elm with his trunk gnarled and furrowed like an Egyptian column, and his flake-like foliage laid on in strips that lie nearly parallel to the horizon-the plane, with his dark green leaves and dense heavy outline, like that of a thunder-cloud-the birch, too, a tree evidently of the gentler sex, with her long flowing tresses falling down to her knee; and as we have looked above and around, we have felt our heart swelling within us with an exquisite emotion that feasts on the grand and the beautiful as its proper food; and surely that mind must be chilled and darkened by the pall of a deathlike scepticism, that does not expand with love and gratitude, under the influence of so exquisite a feeling, to the great and wonderful Being who has imparted so much of good and fair to the forms of inanimate nature, and has bestowed on the creature such a capacity of enjoying them."

Nor is the following ought less grand:

"When standing in front of M'Culloch's exquisite landscape