Hugh Miller

'We have had,' says Dr. Guthrie in a letter dated 6th September 1839, 'a meeting about our newspaper. Miller, I may say, is engaged, and will be here, I expect, in the course of two or three weeks. His salary is to begin with £200, and mount with the profits of the paper. I think this too little, but I have no doubt to see it double that sum in a year or two—Johnstone to be the publisher, we advancing £1000, and he will need other two. I am down with Brown, Candlish, and Cunningham for £25 each. A few individuals only have as yet been applied to, and already £600 of the £1000 has been subscribed.' His household he left behind him in Cromarty for the time, and he lodged in St. Patrick Square. Fortunate was it for the people that at the right time its ear should have been caught by such a writer, one whose voice in the arena was at once recognised by the individuality of its tone. The Edinburgh press had long been held by the Moderate party, 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 signatures, the number, says Robert Chambers, mounted in the first year of The Witness 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 surroundings, 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 judgment 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-man of the party. 'His business,' says Guthrie, the orator of the movement, 'was to fight. Fighting was Miller's delight. On the eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in a high and happy state of eagerness and excitement. He was a scientific as well as an ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less throwing away, his whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the interest of the controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his opponents by fresh matter in every succeeding paper. When I used to discuss questions with him, under the impression, perhaps, that he had said all he had got to say very powerful and very pertinent to the question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in nautical phrase, "Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet—ready for use, if it is needed"!'

And that it was needed, in his own and the Church's interest, the pamphlets of abuse by which he was attacked, and which would form a small library, would remain to show. Thus he was really, all the more from his isolated position, as we shall see, indebted to what Professor Masson, in an appreciation of him in Macmillan's Magazine for 1865, describes as the Goethean 'demonic element.' He had a better knowledge, he shows, of the country and its ecclesiastical history than was possessed by his clerical colleagues, and along with this went what he calls 'a tremendous element of ferocity, more of the Scandinavian than the Celt, leaving his enemy not only slain but battered, bruised and beaten out of shape.' This, though in a sense exaggerated, is true to the extent that he entered the lists not as a mere servant, but as a convinced defender of the liberties of the people. To touch on anything that infringed upon the Presbyterian history of the country—be it by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Sutherland, or other site-refusing landlords of the day, or by some flippant alien and Episcopalian pamphleteer among the briefless of the Parliament House, was certainly to court a bout from which the unwary disputant emerged in a highly battered condition. Yet his pugnacity was really foreign to the nature of the man. His surviving daughter informs the writer he was 'a very mild and gentle father, and his whole attitude was one depressed with humility.' It was, however, well for site-refusers and factors riding on the top of their commission from absentee landlords to feel that attacks upon their policy in The Witness were not to be lightened by any hopes of an apology or by appeals to fear. 'The watchman,' he writes in a letter before us, dated 9th October 1840, 'is crying half-past twelve o'clock, and I have more than half a mile to walk out of town between two rows of trees on a solitary road. Fine opportunity for cudgel-beating factors I carry, however, with me a five-shilling stick, strong enough to break heads of the ordinary thickness, and like quite as well to appeal to an antagonist's fears as to his mercy.'

The Witness started with a circulation of six hundred. Its position among the Scottish papers was at once assured, and no greater proof of the personality of the editor and the quality of 'the leaders' remains than in the curious fact that, now after half a century, to the great mass of the people his name has been not Miller, nor Mr. Miller, but Hugh Miller. As in the similar case of John Bright the people seized on the fact that here was a writer and speaker sprung from themselves, and his christian name was as familiar as his surname. Yet, curiously enough, from first to last he never believed in the profession of an editor, and from the 'new-journalism' of the paragraph and the leaderette he would have turned in disdain. Nothing but the fact that he felt convinced of his mission would have induced him to leave Cromarty for the post. 'I have been,' he could truly say, 'an honest journalist. I have never once given expression to an opinion which I did not conscientiously regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at the time at least, I did not believe to be true.' He never mastered, or felt it necessary to master, the routine details of the business, for the paper was read not for its Parliamentary reports, or the exposition of party politics, but for the essays, sketches, or leaders which were known to be by him. Accordingly the mere fluent production of 'copy,' and the diurnal serving up of the editorial thunder by which the members of the fourth estate fondly delude themselves that they lead public opinion, never really came naturally to him. He prepared himself carefully for his work; and perhaps the bi-weekly issue of the paper and its peculiar nature lessened the strain upon the editor. His successor in the editorial chair of the paper, Dr. Peter Bayne, in the preface to Miller's Essays (1862) says:

Certainly few modern editors could produce such a leader as he did on Dugald Stewart (Aug. 26, 1854), or upon the Encyclopœdia Britannica (April 30, 1842), or could, finding themselves for a day in London, 'when time hung heavy on my hands,' buy a cheap reprint of Eugene Sue's Wandering Jew and convert its hurried perusal into a capital paper on the conflict between Continental Ultramontanism and Liberalism. The individuality of the writer and the tenacity with which he held to his opinions gave the journal a tone naturally impossible to an ordinary party paper. The great mass of the readers of The Witness were of course Liberals, yet he strenuously contended against making it an organ of any political party. Part of the prospectus ran—'The Witness will not espouse the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and divide the country. Public measures, however, will be weighed as they present themselves, in an impartial spirit, and with care proportioned to their importance.' He had noticed, he said, the Church of Scotland for a time converted by Conservatism into a mine against the Whigs, and he was determined that no 'tool-making politician' should again convert it to a party weapon. It was to remain the organ of 'the Free Church people against Whig, Tory, Radical, and Chartist.' So careful was he of the good name of the paper that he 'often retained communications beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding their real value.' Chalmers read the paper to the last with approval, and this was a source of joy and support to Miller. Nothing but such a wise supervision could have piloted The Witness through the abuse and the inventions of the Tory organs. When the Edinburgh Advertiser, of June 13, 1848, could try to improve on that rhetorical flight of Barrère, characteristically fathered by its author on 'an ancient author,' about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants, by an assertion that The Witness had 'menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and the bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled in buttonholes on the streets of Paris!'—proof was naturally wanting. A phantom of a 'grey discrowned head sounding hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall' was also served up by that paper, in its devotion to the house of Buccleuch, as a threat in which the irate scribe professed to detect a subtle attack on the House of Hanover in the interests of the Free Church. 'I am a Whig, in politics,' he said, 'never a Radical or Conservative.' He had no cheap sympathy with the working men, for them he had seen on their worst side. 'Three-fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery) and nine-tenths of their vagabondism will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who like Hogarth's "Careless Apprentice," neglected the opportunity of their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.' He was no believer in household, much less in universal, suffrage, and as an admirer of Delolme's views on our constitution, the radical he regarded as a 'political quack,' convinced as he was that 'those who think must govern those that toil.' But he advocated, along with Guthrie, a system of undenominational education of a kind pretty much what is now established, a moderate extension of the franchise, abolition of entail, and the game laws. The Maynooth grant and Macaulay he opposed. He was an Oliverian for Ireland, and the cause of much trouble in the most distressful country he viewed as associated with that subsidy, which he would have preferred to see converted into a grant for science.

Indeed, like most of his countrymen he had a strong view of historical, as distinguished from mere party, conservatism. The last has of course been rendered simply impossible in Scotland by the history and the ecclesiastical tenets of the country, but he ever carried about him something like the conviction of Dr. Livingstone, that the common people of Scotland had read history and were no levellers. Thus he held, like Burke, to what Mr. Morley calls 'the same energetic feeling about moral laws, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectual knowledge.' This historic conservatism of Burke would be taken by most Scotchmen as a pretty good basis for reasoned Liberalism, and the fixity of Miller's main positions only exposed him the more to the wearisome Tory vocabulary of 'high-flyer, fire-raiser, fanatic,' etc. Admirably in the Letter to Brougham does he seize on the ground of the political Liberalism of Scotland:—

Bitter words, surely, all this for the ecclesiastical wirepullers of 1874, and inheritors of the policy of the Hopes and Muirs, when in approaching the Government with a statement of the intolerable strain of patronage, they tabled that same Letter to Brougham!

To the last, Miller clung to 'the Established principle.' This need not seem wonderful. The Free Church he regarded as the Church of Scotland in all but the state tie, the more so that the coercion by the civil courts had not failed to impress him with the conviction that the Headship, as stipulated for the Scottish Establishment by the Treaty of Union, though defeated by Bolingbroke and lost in the stagnation of the eighteenth century, had passed as an integral part of her constitution to the Free Church. The difficulty attaching to his position proved an unfortunate source of tension between him and some of the leaders, and to this was due that lamentable quarrel with Dr. Candlish which he carried to his grave, and which perhaps broke his heart, for he was what Lord Cockburn had called their mutual friend Murray Dunlop, 'the purest of all enthusiasts' and though Miller triumphed absolutely, yet it was not in human nature to forget that the attack was, however sincere, an attack upon cherished convictions.

There can be, therefore, no good now in minimising the fact that Dr. Candlish, in his zeal to secure a political and tempting opportunity against the Tory party, was led to enter on a quarrel with Miller. The action really amounted to a motion of no confidence in his editorial management. He proposed to centralise the Church press, and to secure the intrusion of a sub-editor on the existing staff, and the conversion of the paper into an explicit and active party organ. But by this time Miller had become one of the proprietors, by undertaking to pay back by instalments the thousand pounds advanced by Johnstone to the subscribers, with the interest, year by year, of the unpaid portion till the whole debt should be extinguished. The most objectionable feature was the proposal to secure the services of some smart Parliament House 'able editor.' The Witness had been accused of 'preferring Protestantism to Macaulay, and damaging the elections.' In this was shown the cloven foot, for it was an attempt to run the paper for the Whigs, and to render it the organ of the legal lights of the Parliament House in pursuit of official posts and spoil, of which Miller justly thought they had enough. Besides, the fall of a Government would mean the fall of that Government paper, and thus its influence as the organ of Free Churchmen would be damaged. Already the paper had parted with one of its best men who had been attracted to The Times, and in the whole scheme Miller saw 'a censorship; and the censor, assisted by the nice taste and tact of the Parliament House editor, is to be Dr. Candlish.' But, he asks, 'who was to control Dr. Candlish?' He could not see the paper jockeyed for a Government, and he stood aloof from 'Exhalations blown aslant, over the faces of even the Evangelical Churches, from the bogs and fens of a hollow Liberalism that professes to respect all religions, and believes none.' He felt that he had the people behind him, and 'possessing their confidence, I do not now feel justified in retiring from my post: Dr. Candlish and his Parliament House friends are not the ministers and people of the Free Church of Scotland—"of wiles, more inexpert, I boast not,"—the difference must either close entirely, or the people of Scotland must be made fully acquainted with the grounds on which it rests.' The unfortunate rupture closed by the very pointed question by Chalmers, 'Which of you could direct Hugh Miller?'

Meanwhile, in the Highlands and Islands, things were for a time going hard with the now disestablished Church. In some cases they had to preach 'where the snow was falling so heavily upon the people, that when it was over they could scarcely distinguish the congregation from the ground, except by their faces.' Baird of Cockburnspath had passed away in a room, 'a few inches above which were the slates of the roof, without any covering, and as white with hoar frost within as they were white with snow without. His very breath on the blankets was frozen as hard as the ice outside.' At Canonbie, Guthrie had passed Johnny Armstrong's Tower, and preached in wind and rain to a large congregation, 'old men, apparently near the grave, all wet and benumbed with the keen wind and cold rain.' In Cromarty, Miller's old friend Stewart was now preaching in the factory close, and there, in the summer of 1843, after a night of rain had swept the streets, his mind reverts to the congregations over Scotland in the open air—'I do begrudge the Moderates our snug, comfortable churches. I begrudge them my father's pew. It bears date 1741, and has been held by the family, through times of poverty and depression, a sort of memorial of better days, when we could afford getting a pew in the front gallery. But yonder it lies, empty within an empty church, a place for spiders to spin undisturbed, while all who should be occupying it take their places on stools and forms in the factory close.' The subtle mark of Scottish gentility in the allusion to the pew will not fail to strike the reader. Let it not be said that it savours of 'gigmanity'—in that standing bugbear of Carlyle!

In 1844 he set out on a geological ramble round the Hebrides in the floating manse, 'The Betsey,' by which the Church served the islands in the west, owing to the refusal of sites by Lord Macdonald and others. The yacht was but thirty feet by eleven, and there with his old Cromarty friend Swanson, the 'outed' minister of the Small Isles, he learned the hardships to which the miserable policy of the landlords had exposed the poor Highlanders. But if 'the earth was the lairds' and the fulness thereof,' the water was not! The building in which the congregation met was of turf—'the minister encased in his ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a genuine sou'wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped half a yard down his back; and I, closely wrapped up in my grey maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection, against the penetrating powers of a Hebridean drizzle.' In none of his works does he exhibit a happier descriptive view than in The Cruise of the Betsey, though in popularity it has been surpassed by his First Impressions of England, where he records the results of an eight weeks' tour, in 1845, from Newcastle to London, passing York, Birmingham, and Stratford on the way. In 1847 he published his Footprints of the Creator, in reply to the Vestiges by Robert Chambers, in which he seeks to controvert the theory of development, at least in the form in which it was then presented, by attempting to prove the fishes and the fossils of the Old Red to be as advanced in character as those now existing. A racy sketch on The Geology of the Bass formed part of a contribution to a work then issued, dealing with the history, botany, and zoology of the Bass Rock. The copyright of this he reserved with a view to its subsequent incorporation into a long-projected geological survey of Scotland. But this cherished idea he never lived to accomplish, though such a work from his hand would have been well-nigh final and perfect in its descriptive graces.

He was still in the enjoyment of his great physical power in spite of the severe strain to which his editorial and literary labours exposed him, added to as these were by his appearances in London and elsewhere as a public lecturer. As an exponent of science he could attract an audience in Exeter Hall of five thousand persons, whose attention he held to the close in spite of his northern accent; though perhaps this, like the Fifeshire speech of Chalmers and the Annandale tongue of Carlyle, may have given an extra charm to the individuality of the lecturer. The quarrel with Candlish had thinned the ranks of some of his friends, nor did he ever draw to the circle of Edinburgh as he had done to those in Cromarty. He was not to be easily got at by the eminent men who sought his acquaintance, yet it is with pleasure we catch occasional glimpses of him in the society of the best that either Edinburgh or London could produce. Stewart in Cromarty had passed away, in 1847, during the prosecution to him of a call to St. George's to succeed Candlish, who had been translated to the college chair left vacant by Chalmers. None of his friends were nearer to him than Mackgill-Crichton of Rankeillour in Fife, and there we find him one Christmas along with Sir David Brewster and Guthrie. Both Miller and his host were men of great physical powers, and—as Professor Masson notes—the geologist had a habit of estimating men by their physique. Crichton had narrated how he had started by the side of the mail coach as it passed his gates, and after a run of twenty miles he had been the first at the ferry. 'A horse could do more than either of you,' was the amused rejoinder of Brewster.

The issue of his Schools and Schoolmasters (1854), republished from the columns of his paper, brought him warm encomiums from Carlyle, Robert Chambers, and others. Miller in politics and other points differed strongly from Chambers, and of course at this time the secret of the authorship of the Vestiges had not been divulged. Yet beautifully does Chambers, to whom Scottish publishing and periodical literature owes so much, refer to the early days in Cromarty in comparison with his own struggles in Peebles. Readers who may have not quite forgiven some passages in Chambers's History of the Rebellion of 1745 will doubtless soften their asperity after reading Chambers's account of his struggling through a whole set of the Encyclopædia Britannica which he had in a lumber garret,—setting out at sixteen, 'as a bookseller with only my own small collection of books as a stock—not worth more than two pounds, I believe, quickly independent of all aid—not all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of self-reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, unamiable light, while my recollections of "honest poverty" may have made me too eager to attain and secure worldly prosperity. Had I possessed uncles such as yours, I might have been much the better of it through life.'

The close was cheered by the thought that he had fairly earned the admiration and confidence of his country. Yet nothing that could in any way fetter his editorial independence or freedom of action could he permit. When the money invested in The Witness was offered to him by Chalmers it was firmly declined, and the proposal to requite his services to the country by providing him with a residence he would not allow. 'I know,' he said, 'that as the defender of Free Church principles my intentions have been pure and loyal, but I am not quite sure I have been successful in doing the right thing, nor have I done anything that is worthy of such consideration from my friends. I believe my way is to make yet.' The same was his answer to a proposal to allow his name to stand for election as Lord Rector of Marischal College in Aberdeen; he met it pretty much in the vein of Carlyle at Edinburgh, when he felt that here was a generation in young Scotland rising up who seemed to say that he had not altogether, after a hard-spent day, been an unprofitable servant. Time had softened the ecclesiastical asperities of other years, and in 1853 Lord Dalhousie wrote to Lord Aberdeen to secure his election for the vacant Chair of Natural History in Edinburgh. But it fell to Edward Forbes. Again he was singled out by Lord Breadalbane, in 1855, and he was offered the post of Distributor of Stamps for Perthshire, an office which would to him have been a comfortable sinecure, securing alike competence and much leisure. For twenty-eight years Wordsworth in Westmoreland filled such a post, and Miller's banking experiences would have fitted him perfectly for it. But he felt that a man turned fifty could not take up a new vocation with success. That in this he was too modest there can be no doubt; but after a brief consideration he made up his mind to decline. 'I find,' he said, 'my memory not now so good as it was formerly. I forget things which I was wont to remember with ease. I am not clear, in such circumstances, about taking upon me any money responsibility.'

In fact, the long and severe strain of sixteen years had told. Of the extraordinary memory whose failure he regrets, Guthrie supplies a forcible example. In the shop of Johnstone the publisher a discussion turned on some debate in the Town Council, when Miller said it reminded him of a scene in Galt's Provost. He repeated the passage, halting at the speech of the convener of the trades, but was evidently vexed at the temporary breakdown. He got a copy from the front shop, and turned up the passage. Then they learned that, though it was fifteen years since last he had seen the book, he had repeated page after page verbatim.

The year 1856 was one remarkable for garotte robberies. This awakened in the overtaxed brain of Miller a fear for his museum of geological specimens which he had housed for himself at Shrub Mount, Portobello. The last four years of his life he had spent there, and often he would leave the house and return late in the evening after hours of investigation of the coast line and geological features of Leith and the surrounding country. He knew his Edinburgh thoroughly; some of his happiest papers are to be read in his Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood; and it was after one of these excursions that Sir Archibald Geikie had seen him, as he describes in the reminiscence to be found in the last pages of this work. The fear of burglars had taken hold firmly of his imagination, and he resumed the habit of bearing fire-arms which he had begun at Cromarty when carrying the money of the bank between that town and Tain. The inflammation of the lungs in his early days as a mason had again at intervals returned, and his sleep was broken by dreams of such a harassing nature that he would wake in the morning to examine his clothes, in the belief that he was now the victim of evil spirits. In such a condition it was not unnatural that his mind should take a colour from other days, where the reader may remember his own account of seeing the figure at the door after his father's death. Professor Masson, we see, notes this point, and he believes that Miller felt a strange fascination for all stories of second-sight. Though he never wrote or spoke of such, except in the sober tone of science, yet 'my impression,' he says, 'is that Hugh Miller did all his life carry about him, as Scott did, but to a greater extent, a belief in ghostly agencies of the air, earth, and water, always operating, and sometimes revealing themselves. One sees his imagination clinging to what his reason would fain reject.' The only hope lay in a total cessation from all work, but this was found impossible through the almost second nature which over-exertion had become to him. He had also a rooted dislike for all medicines, and it was with difficulty that he was induced to put himself under the management of Dr. Balfour and Professor Miller. The last day of his life was given to the revision of the proof-sheets of his Testimony of the Rocks, and in the evening he turned over the pages of Cowper, whose works had ever been among his standard favourites. By a curious fatality his eye rested on The Castaway, written by the poet in a similar mental condition, and which for sustained force and limpid expression is unrivalled as a religious lyric. He retired to rest on the night of the 24th December 1856. Next morning, his body, half-dressed, was found with a bullet from a revolver through his left lung. He had lifted a heavy woven jersey over his chest before he fired, which showed that death had not been accidental. On a table a loose sheet of paper was found on which had been written these lines to his wife:—

It fell to Dr. Guthrie, in whose church of Free St. John's the deceased had been an office member, to apprise the widow of the real nature of the case; and in order to secure her sanction for a post-mortem examination the above letter had to be produced, showing that his purpose had been executed almost before the ink was dry. On the 26th the verdict was issued:—'From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the act was suicidal, under the impulse of insanity.' His funeral was the largest Edinburgh had seen since that of Chalmers, and by his side in the Grange Cemetery he was laid. To the mass of his countrymen abroad he was the greatest of living Scotchmen. His works had given him a European reputation in science, while to those at home the work he had accomplished as a tribune of the people had given him a position second only to that of Guthrie.

A generation has arisen since which hears but by vague report the principles for which the men of 1843 contended. It takes many a man to fall in the ditch before glorious revolutions can successfully march over in their pumps and silk stockings, giving their victorious three-times-three. It has been sought to minimise these issues, to explain them away after the manner of 'able editors' and complacent philosophers cheerfully 'at ease in Zion,' and to maintain, with the hardy gravity of ignorance, that the combatants really knew not what they fought for—the Headship of Christ, Anti-Patronage, or resistance to the civil courts. Similar futilities we have seen ventilated over the American Civil War. The North, say the philosophic thinkers, or tinkers, did not know whether it fought for the preservation of the Union or against slavery. Such speculations are too thin to carry much weight. In both cases many went to their grave for what they believed to be principle, and all such men may be safely trusted to have reached some conclusions and clear issues. These issues obviously all met; after Auchterarder on the one hand, and South Carolina on the other, had led the way, no such easy subterfuge was possible for either party.

The lesson then learned at such a cost might never have been necessary, with a better adjustment of the political balance, which has been again found wanting and craves a final and a rational settlement. What Fairfoul in 1662 told Middleton had been simply again repeated in 1843 by Muir and Hope, who held the ear of Sir James Graham, to whom Peel had resigned the whole management of Scottish affairs. For all that Graham knew of them, Peel might as well have left them to a foreigner. It took the death of thousands of Irishmen in the potato famine of 1847 to convince the overfed John Bull of even the barest existence of an Irish Question, and many a man went to his grave before Lord Aberdeen, Peel, Graham, and other official people could learn for themselves the true condition of Scotland. Then it was too late, and their regrets were vain. The bill of Bolingbroke brought in, as Burnet said, to weaken the Scottish Church, had produced its logical effects in widening the gulf between the people and the nobility of Scotland; education at Eton, Harrow, and the English Universities had done the rest. Carlyle is known to have regarded the action of the Church in 1843 as the greatest thing in his time; the sole survivor of the Peel ministry, Mr. Gladstone, has expressed the same opinion; while the critical, wiry, and alert little Jeffrey was 'proud of his country.' It bears to-day the mark very strongly of Hugh Miller. Nor need the workman be ashamed of his work—from which, therefore, let him not be separated.

  CHAPTER V

IN SCIENCE

'In league with the stones of the field.'—Job v. 23.

The geologist writes in sand literally and historically, and in the science of the Testimony of the Rocks super-session is the law. 'Such,' says Miller himself in the preface to the first edition of the Old Red Sandstone, 'is the state of progression in geological science that the geologist who stands still but for a very little must be content to find himself left behind.' The advancing tide of knowledge leaves the names of the early pioneers little more than a list of extinct volcanoes. Hooke and Burnet, Ray and Woodward, Moro and Michel, are to the ordinary mass of readers about as obsolete as the saurian and the mastodon. Only the very few can live in a tide so strong, which bears away not only the older landmarks but even such names as Werner and Hutton, Hall and Fleming.

From about 1830 to 1850 the old metaphysical reign seems to have ceased; and Jeffrey, in the palmy days of the Edinburgh Review, could declare that the interest in psychology had well-nigh passed away with Dugald Stewart. Natural Science seemed to be taking its place, and the British Association movement lent impetus to the new régime. Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Owen, and others, followed by Huxley and Tyndall, appeared to herald the advent of an age when the most difficult problems could be read off the book of Nature, and the public turned eagerly from the Babel of the philosophers to the men of the new school in a sort of expectation of a royal road to learning, without missing their way in theological jungle or 'skirting the howling wastes' of metaphysics. Needless to say, the hopes were no more realised than were the expectations of a golden age of material prosperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The problem of man and his destiny remains as rooted as ever, and the metaphysician has not been dislodged. The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the domain of mental science, and when transferred to the natural sciences the fight was not productive of the expected results. The times, as Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve round that centre: there is no pure entire confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and the school of natural science was in possession of the field. Now the tide has turned, and the geologist is threatened with eclipse. Of the doyen of the new school, Richard Owen, Professor Huxley says:—'Hardly any of those speculations and determinations have stood the test of investigation. I am not sure that any one but the historian of anatomical science is ever likely to recur to them. Obvious as are the merits of Owen's anatomical and palæontological work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discuss them; and countless pages of analysis of his memoirs would not have made the general reader any wiser than he was at first.' Even Buckland is regarded by Boyd Dawkins as belonging to a type of extinct men. Thus is the deposition effected of the scientific Pope of the day. If such rapid supersession be the law, who can expect in departing to leave footprints in the annals of so shifting a science? Who can be a fixed star?

There is some comfort in the reflection that, as in Political Economy, so in Geology, it is the inspiration that lives and not the mere amount of positive contribution to knowledge. Bacon has effected nothing for science; in everything that he attempted it may be shown that he was wrong and that his methods have led to nothing. His name is associated with no new discovery, no new law, not even with a new or inductive method. But his niche is secure through the spirit in which he approached the question; if he did not see the Promised Land, at least he was a firm believer in its existence, and that spirit has outlived his unhappy detraction of greater men than himself in mental philosophy. His mind was swift to perceive analogies, and such a type of mind, if it adds little to actual knowledge, is at least valuable as a stimulus. Carlyle in his political pamphlets has certainly not advanced the lines of the 'dismal science'; he even contemptuously doubted its existence, and he has done harm to it through the ready-reckoner school of à priori economists who refer everything with confidence to their own internal consciousness. Yet Carlyle at his worst has his value. He has the merit of showing that the problem is in its very nature an everlasting one, and that the plummet line of the mere profit-and-loss moralist will never sound the depths of man and his destiny. Such thinkers are, however, rare; but in natural science they are the salt. Such are Oken, Cuvier, Darwin; their position is independent of the truth of their theories, and they have the gift of a fused and informing imagination, by which their theories are landmarks. Much of their work has already been recast, and some of their once supposed safest generalisations have been abandoned. But the progress of science revolves round them as central suns. Hardly one of Niebuhr's interpretations of Roman history has stood the test of subsequent investigations, any more than those of Ewald in the field of Biblical criticism. Yet in historical science no two men have a more assured rank.

It is this informing power that keeps alive the geologist. Hume owes his position in metaphysics to this power, and to his great gifts as a stylist. Few men of science have had graces of style. In Darwin it is lacking, and he has himself set on record that literature and art had ceased for him to exert any influence, and that a mere novel had become the highest form of intellectual amusement. Hutton needed a Playfair to make him intelligible, as Dugald Stewart was needed for the exposition of Reid. But it is this power that will keep Miller alive. His views upon the Old Red Sandstone, on the Noachian Deluge, on the Mosaic Cosmogony, may be right or wrong. But they have the sure merit of abiding literature, and men highly endowed with this gift have a lasting and assured fame. Mr. Lowell has declared Clough to be the true poet of the restlessness of the later half of the century, and Tennyson to be but its pale reflex. But the answer is ready and invincible: Tennyson is read, and Clough is already on the shelf. As a piece of imaginative writing, The Old Red Sandstone is not likely to be soon surpassed in its own line. 'I would give,' we find Buckland declaring, 'my left hand to possess such powers of description as this man has.' 'There is,' says Carlyle, 'right genial fire, everywhere nobly tempered down with peaceful radical heat, which is very beautiful to see. Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, strong, fresh, and breezy, like the "Old Red Sandstone" mountains in a sunny summer day.' We doubt if a single page of Sedgwick, or of Buckland even in his Bridgewater Treatise, be read—at least as literature. But a man, whose book upon the 'Old Red' has seen its twentieth edition, whose Testimony of the Rocks is in its forty-second thousand, and whose Footprints has seen a seventeenth edition, has only attained this popularity by his solid merits as a writer and thinker. Mere popularisation cannot explain it. When a man has fully mastered his subject, and his subject has mastered him, there is sure to emerge a certain demonic force in literature or in science, all the more if the writer be a man with a style.

It need hardly be said that geology, from its very first appearance, had been associated with distinct views in Biblical criticism. The old chronology of Archbishop Ussher in the margin of the Authorised Version, by which B.C. 4004 was gravely assigned as the date of the Creation of the world, and B.C. 2348 for the Deluge, was in conflict with a science which required ages for its operations and not the limited confines of six thousand years, which form but a mere geological yesterday to the scientist like Lyell, who postulates some eighty millions of years for the formation of the coal-beds of Nova Scotia. The six 'days' of the Biblical Creation were thought unworthy, as a mere huddling of events into a point of time, of the Divine Wisdom, and impossible in conception. Mistakes in positive statement, no less than of implication, were also alleged against the Mosaic record, which was said to be admirable as literature if not immaculate in science. For long geology was regarded as a hostile intruder, and it required much time to assuage the fears on the one hand and lessen the rather vague pretensions on the other, before the lines of demarcation could be firmly drawn, if indeed, in a certain class of both theological and scientific minds, they can be said to be even yet settled. There is still the Voltairian type of thinker which is not yet exploded; and which, even in the case of Professor Huxley, has imagined that a mere shaking of the letter of a text or two is tantamount to an annihilation of the Christian faith. 'That the sacred books,' as Carlyle says, 'could be all else than a Bank of Faith Bill, for such and such quantities of enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world, value received; which Bill becomes a waste paper, the stamp being questioned; that the Christian Religion could have any deeper foundations than books, nothing of this seems to have even in the faintest matter occurred to Voltaire. Yet herein, as we believe the whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the question.' Science, in fact, after a long régime of even more than Macaulayesque cocksureness, is now abating its tone. It now no longer threatens like a second flood to cover the earth, and it is possible for mental and historical science to reappear like the earth out of the waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the limits of mind and matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no longer possible for a Voltaire to meet the theologian with a belief that the shells found on high hills were dropped by pilgrims and palmers from the Holy Land, any more than it would be possible to assert, with Dugald Stewart, that the words in Sanskrit akin to Greek were dropped by the troops of Alexander the Great. It is now as impossible to maintain, with the mythologists of legend, that the Ross-shire hills were formed by the Cailliach-more, or great woman, who dropped stones through the bottom of the panniers on her back, as it would be for any reactionary Chauteaubriand to assert that God made the world, at the beginning, precisely as we see it with all its completeness and antiquity, since he believed an infancy of the world would be a world without romance!—denying creation in periods, and asserting it in instantaneous processes, by which the fossils were even created just as we see them. Such a conception is not to exalt the Divine Power; or, if it appears to do so, it yet effectively annihilates a belief in the Divine Wisdom that could create pretty toys and useless fossils—a creation of mummies and skeletons that were never from the very beginning intended to be anything but skeletons, without any relation to living beings.

Miller accordingly makes it perfectly plain in what spirit he approaches the sacred record. The Bible, he says repeatedly, is neither a scientific text-book nor even a primer. Why, he asks, should it be regarded as necessary to promulgate the truths of geology when those of astronomy have been withheld? 'Man has everywhere believed in a book which should be inspired and should teach him what God is and what God demands of him, and this expectation is fully met in the Bible. But nowhere has man looked for the divine revelation of scientific truth, for it is in accordance with the economy of Providence, that Providence which is exhibited in gradual developments, that no such expectation has been or need be realised, the Principia of Newton and the discoveries of James Watt being both the result of the natural and unaided faculties of man.' Nay, more; there never could have been such a revelation given, for never yet has a single scientific truth been revealed. But, on the other hand, when he contrasts this clear perception of the demarcation of religion and science in the Bible, and the all too copious neglect of it in the other sacred books of the world, he is constrained to regard this very ability of distinction between two classes of truth as a strong argument for its inspiration.

On Man and his destiny he is no less clear, and he has many fertile suggestions to offer. His main thesis in this connection we have already seen as determining in his own life its central point. Man he regards as literally the fellow-worker with God. Up till his appearance upon the earth, nature had been remarkable only for what it was, but not for what it became. The advent of man marks the improver of creation—God made manifest in the flesh. Between his intellect and that of his Creator there is a relation, since we find creature and Creator working by the same methods. Precisely as we see China arriving at the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass without any connection with the West, so we see the works of the Creator in the palæozoic period repeated by the tiny creature-worker, without any idea that he had been anticipated. Thus Creation is not merely a scheme adapted to the nature of man, but one specially adapted to the pattern nature of God. Man made in the image of God is a real and fitting preparation for God's subsequent assumption of the form of man. 'Stock and graft had the necessary affinity,' and were finally united in the one person. History is, therefore, no mere finite record dating from a human act in Eden, but is the real result of a decree, 'in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme.'

The problem of the origin of evil is of course a difficulty viewed in relation to the decrees of God, in whom no evil can exist. In the present state of things he regards evil as due to man himself. The deputed head of creation has voluntarily and of his own free will not chosen to be a fellow-worker with God, who, while binding him fast in the chain of events, has yet left his will free. To ordain sin would be a self-contradiction of the idea of God; He but creates the being that in turn creates sin. 'Fore-knowledge,' as Milton says, 'had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain unforeseen.' Perhaps this is as near as we are ever likely to get. But the Fall in its theological aspect, while it must be fully apprehended by faith, has nothing to fear from science, which teaches, if it can be said emphatically to teach one thing, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. With Coleridge, therefore, he regards the Fall as a necessary stage in the history of thought and of man. The creation of the non-absolute gives a pivot without which all subsequent events would be inexplicable. It gives the true means of colligating the phenomena: Man, if at the Fall he lost Eden, gained a conscience and a moral sense.

More remarkable is his attempted reconciliation of science and the Mosaic cosmogony. Chalmers had regarded the Biblical account as relating only to existing creations, and believed in the existence of a chaotic period of death and darkness between this present world and the prior geological ages. Pye Smith, on the other hand, had regarded chaos as both temporary and limited in extent, and believed that outside this area there had existed lands and seas basking in light and occupied by animals. But subsequent geological knowledge had shown that this theory of cataclysms and breaks was without evidence—many of the present plants and animals co-existing with those of the former periods; nor could Smith's theory of light existing round the coasts of the earth be brought to square with the distinct statement of the primal creation of light in Genesis. On the other hand, Miller notices that geology, as dealing not with the nature of things, but only with their actual manifestations, has to do with but three of the six days or periods. The scale of all geologists is divided into three great classes. Lesser divisions of systems, deposits, beds, and strata may exist; but the master divisions, as he calls them, are simply those three which even the unpractised eye can detect—the Palæozoic, the Secondary, and the Tertiary. The first is the period of extraordinary fauna and flora—the period emphatically of forests and huge pines, 'the herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit.' The second is the age of monsters, reptiles, pterodactyls and ichthyosaurs, 'the fowl that flieth above the earth, the great sea-monsters and winged fowl after its kind.' The Tertiary period is that of 'the beasts of the earth and the cattle after their kind.' In each age, it is true, there is a twilight period, a period of morning-dawn and evening-decline; but in the middle of each period it is that we find the great outstanding features above. Thus there would be no contradictions in the record. This, it must be allowed, summarises truly enough the process of creation; but it leaves out of sight the invertebrata and early fishes of the first period, and regards the succeeding carboniferous era as the leading features, while perhaps in some subordinate details it inverts the order of other appearances.

To the wider objection to the Biblical record, with its light before the creation of the sun upon the fourth day, the vegetation on the third independent of the sun's warming rays, and to other real or supposed contradictions, Miller has a highly ingenious reply. We do not think it fully meets the necessities of the case, but it has unquestionably the merit of imaginative power, and is in full harmony with the nature of man's mind, and is therefore preferable to any theory which would assert the exact science of the Mosaic record by its anticipation of the theory of Laplace and Herschel, by which the earth existed before the sun was given as a luminary, and was independent of the sun for light. Perhaps the theory of progressive revelation will commend itself to most as the truest and the simplest explanation, though it should be noted that the extraordinary approximation of the Biblical version to the latest science does really set it far above the merely human speculation of some old Hebrew Newton or Descartes.

While regarding the 'days' as ages, Miller views the record as the result of an optical vision presented to the writer. He truly enough remarks that any exact revelation would have defeated its own object through an elaborate statement to man at an early stage. Man would not have believed it, as it would have contradicted his own experience. He would no more have believed that the earth revolved on its own axis than that molluscs had preceded him on the earth. The record, therefore, he regards as according to appearance rather than to physical realities: 'The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until the fourth day of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface.' The six days or periods he takes to correspond with the six divisions in a successive series of the Azoic, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Oolitic, and Tertiary ages. To the human eye of the seer, the second day would afford nothing to divert it from the atmospheric phenomena; on the fourth the celestial phenomena would alone be so prominent as to call for specific mention. But, familiar to most readers as the famous passage is, we here present it as the best example of his descriptive and imaginative powers. If there are to be reconciliations at all, as either necessary or desirable, it would be hard to beat this fine piece of fused strength and imagination.[4]