scrutiny into the nature of the chain that binds him; and hence it is that Calvinism proves the best possible of all schoolmasters for teaching a religious people to think.' There is some truth in these remarks; but perhaps even the eye of our author did not see the whole truth on this subject. We do not pretend to do so either, but think that there is a little more in it than his rapid glance in this case discerned. In the first place, Arminianism, as well as Calvinism, does lead every thinking mind into the abstrusest recesses, and does awaken all who think and feel. Nay, it awakens many (witness Wesleyanism!) more powerfully than Calvinism itself. Why? The great difference between the two systems lies in the source where they respectively fix the beginning of our blank subjection and blind ignorance. Calvinism, fixing this in one cause the will of God; Arminianism, fixing it partly in this and partly in the will of man; but none of them explaining how it comes about that either controls human destiny, what either really is, or how the two powers or influences can be harmonized. Both the Calvinist and the Arminian feel themselves bound, that is, if they think on the subject accurately, or at all; but while the Calvinist feels only one chain, the Arminian feels two, for his own will, too, binds him, although it is seemingly with a soft and silken tie; and the difference is, that while the system of the one is simpler and more philosophical, the subjection of both is complete, and neither can fully reconcile his own responsibility with the tyrannous stream of tendency in which he is involved, arising from God or himself; and yet each knows that such a reconciliation there must be, ere God can be just and the sinner not guiltless. Another difference may be, that while the Arminian, deluding himself with the idea that he can break the chains which bind him, sometimes makes the trial mainly in his own power, and with no thought of God, and fails; the Calvinist, thinking that the chain is infrangible, save by direct Divine influence (in other words, save by a contradictory movement on the part of Omnipotence), frequently lies still in helpless passivity. But it is hard to tell whether helpless action, or hopeless inaction, be the worse extreme. The only possible medium lies in the apostolic words, Work out your salvation, seeing it is God that worketh in you to will and to do.' Do not seek to inquire narrowly into the nature of the chain or chains which bind you; that be sure ye shall never in this world know; still less violently seek to break these chains. You cannot; and may soon find your own will as irresistible and inscrutable as God's. All you can do is to struggle and aspire in your chains. Where is the captive so heavily ironed, but he can stir and look upwards? And in that stirring and upcast aspiration, if it be continued perseveringly, lies your salvation, and that result is at once your and God's work. Before proceeding to one or two points connected with the question, What has Hugh Miller done with the extraordinary powers, acquirements, and high Christianity of his character, we have to notice, in fine, as to his literary efforts, their intensely practical character. He owed this partly to the natural tendency of his mind, and partly to circumstances and training, which brought him long, and sometimes rather roughly, in contact with the realities of things. He was at one time a stonemason-at another, a banker's clerk-at a third, an editor of a newspaper and throughout these varied occupations, a hard-hammering geologist. All this served to give him a stern and angular cast of mind, to brush away whatever dreamy poetic mist might have threatened to gather around him, and to keep his commonsense on a level with his genius. Hence, it is truly refreshing in an age when there is, in writing even of merit, so much of bewilderment, pretension to depth, and vague, pointless platitudes, to light upon such pithy utterances, expressed uniformly in clear, solid Saxon, and bearing on our every-day business, as abound in his works. What has Hugh Miller done? He has, it will be said, written such books as 'Old Red Sandstone,' 'My Schools and Schoolmasters,' 'Letter to Lord Brougham,' 'Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland,' &c., all weighty, interesting, original, and composed with great force and eloquence. But the question recurs, What are the leading ideas he has sought to inculcate on the world, and how far has he succeeded in his efforts? To a short consideration of these we now address ourselves. First-He has asserted the dignity of work; the importance of the labouring man; and the necessity of culture, and of Christianity, to the lower classes. He did so, partly by precept, and partly by example. He has repeatedly in his writings urged his fellow-workmen to forego low habits; to struggle with that dull and idle despair which often depresses them still more than intemperance; and to aspire, by industry, the cultivation of their minds, and attention to the precepts of Christ, to rise in the social scale. And, in order to enforce his exhortations, he has appealed to his own history, substantially, thus'Why have I risen from the ranks? Not from genius alone! No! had I possessed nothing else, I might have got the length of a hedge schoolmaster, or of a poor despised gauger, like Burns; and ere this, I had probably been found dead in a ditch; but I carefully watched my opportunities of self-improvement. I maintained a sober, steady deportment; and while I wrought at my trade, I read literature, and studied science the science I found next me, within my hands, and under my feet the science of geology; and while doing all this, I read my Bible and worshipped and feared my God. Go ye and do likewise.' In thus saying and acting, Hugh Miller has done immensely more than Burns to make the bonnet of the poor man stand high on his brow, and to elevate the aspirations of his brethren in toil, not only in Scotland, but throughout the whole world. Secondly-Miller tried to raise the character of the newspaper press in Scotland. That stood always high intellectually, but was, as a whole, intensely secular, when it was not openly infidel, in its tone. Our author, so soon as he entered on its arena, set himself to subject all matters to the standard of religious principle. He did not, like some papers in his own country, square off a certain space for bits of Scripture, and quotations from religious writers a kind of 'God's acre'-and then leave all the rest of the field open to every species of malice, misrepresentation, envy, and uncharitableness. He sought to steep his whole sheet in essential Christianity. He did not entirely succeed in this; he was sometimes betrayed by passion, pique, or party necessities, into feelings and language opposed to the spirit of the gospel. But this was inevitable, and we regret it less than we do the fact that so few of our newspaper editors have followed his better example, and that in Christianity, as well as in commanding genius and rugged honesty, Hugh Miller stood at his death, not altogether, but almost alone. Thirdly-Miller offered to view the interesting phenomenon of a man rising gradually (like an elephant amidst a load of baggage) out of the trammels of party, into gigantic and almost Ishmaelitish independence, and into those expansive relations of mind without which, we suspect, there can hardly exist the truest and highest genius. He began his career as an ardent disciple of the Confession of Faith, and a keen supporter of the Evangelical side of the Church of Scotland; his early sympathies were with the straitest tenets, and the sternest language of his creed; and when, afterwards, he found his Church involved in a crisis, he lent the whole force of his pen to her service, and was hailed by the majority of her members as next to Chalmers, the main author and the glory of the disruption. Various circumstances have tended somewhat of late to cool him to a portion of his party. It were simply calling him either a 'faultless monster whom the world ne'er saw,' or, a hollow hypocrite, to say that he did not feel the slights of some of the disruption divines-the fact, for instance, that in Buchanan's memorial of the Ten Years' Struggle his name was ignored, an omission as contemptible as though, in a history of the anti-slavery agitation in Britain, there were no mention of the name of Clarkson-and he notoriously revolted at the almost Papal supremacy of Candlish. But while all this, and more than this, is true, it was principally owing to his widening catholicity and Christianity of view that he ceased to be a party man, and that, although his interest in his Church continued deep, he was no longer heard, like a chained watch-dog, barking indiscriminately at her foes, or seen embracing indiscriminately her friends. It has been hinted that his attachment to the Christian faith has of late been loosened this we do not believe, it has yet to be proved; but if any slackening had begun, we would attribute it partly to his disgust at the tortuous policies, trickeries, and hollowness, of professed Christians and Christian leaders, and partly to the chilling and uncertain nature of his scientific studies, not to any falling off either in Christian feeling, or in the Christian life. But we are disposed unhesitatingly to deny that his faith was shaken, or that his piety was lessened, although he had, undoubtedly, become vastly more liberal in his views, sentiments, and language. He was, in fact, too great for any party; but no man can be too great for Christ. Fourthly-He had, as we have just hinted, his full share in the. formation of the Free Church. This particular might lead us into long illustrations, and, perhaps, some awkward collisions which we rather wish to shun. The Free Church is, as yet, an incomplete experiment. So far as it has done good-and it has done muchMiller deserves a large share of the credit; and the evil connected with it has arisen from measures and counsels over which he had no control, and against some of which he vehemently and often protested. Against a style of preaching, too, very prevalent amongst its clergymen, and manifestly behind the age, and unworthy of Christianity, he, in conjunction with Guthrie, some years since, lifted up his voice in terms which were listened to, but, we fear, not generally obeyed. Fifthly-To the reconciliation of geology with Scripture, Hugh Miller has devoted all the riches of his knowledge, and all the energies of his genius, and would, we believe, have preferred no epitaph to this, Here lies the man who has reconciled the testimony of the rocks to the first chapter of Genesis.' We, for our part, do not see much grandeur in this epitaph, or in the achievement it would have commemorated, not much more than though it had been varied thus-Here lies the man who reconciled the Copernican hypothesis to the words in the 104th Psalm, "The sun ariseth. They gather themselves together." We never could see much greater difficulty in the one case of discrepancy than in the other. Both spring from the same grand mistakes about verbal inspiration, and about the Bible being answerable for the scientific ideas of its age. It had been a very different thing had Miller reconciled the spirit and genius of modern science and philosophy to those of Judaism and Christianity. These, in many points, are exceedingly diverse, although it were easy to show that the diversity bears as strongly against the divinity of the two former, as of the two latter against nature as against religion. Butler has shown that the same difficulties apply to nature as to revelation. He might have shown that more difficulties apply to the former than to the latter, and that there is more evidence for Christianity than for the God of Nature. Still there is a problem as to the causes of the diversity in spirit or moral character, &c., between what are generally thought emanations of the same power, which Miller and no man has yet solved, and the difficulty connected with which there is little evidence that he ever saw. We wonder, too, and rejoice as well as wonder, that he preserved so much piety while working amongst the cold slush or the fire-mists of chaos, and handling those hideous miscreations in which man sees many of his own features represented as in gigantic mockery and colossal caricature. Strong as the evidence for the modern geology is, there are dark thoughts and difficulties connected with it, compared to which those of the Bible are trifling, and which call still more strongly for an act of faith; and these Miller has not touched with one of his fingers. Yet, if he has not explained the mysteries, no man has so admirably brought out the poetry of geological science. He absolutely revels in the contemplation of those vast cons and those enormous monsters which preceded the coming of man; runs races with the mammoth and the mastodon; cleaves the aboriginal air with the pterodactyle; swims the ocean with the holoptychius and pterichthys, or paddles in the water with the ichthyosaurus. Swedenborg himself, in his mythical visions, has not extracted more Dantesque grandeur from his nightmare shapes of red snakes swimming through oceans of fire,' &c., than Miller from those early abortions which the mind has sometimes difficulty from refraining to think as unreal and fantastic as the others. In one point, Hugh Miller, by a glance of his own mind, anticipated what has become since a popular doctrine, we mean the non-plurality of worlds. This doctrine was pleaded at length, in 1854, by Dr. Whewell, in a well-known and very able treatise. Hugh Miller had, in 1845, started the same idea, as an answer to those who objected to the modern geology because it involved a waste of time and space. Miller pointed to the heavens and said, 'See the same waste there: can you prove that these planets and suns are yet inhabited, although they are probably preparing for habitation?' Curiously enough, we had, in the previous year (1844) started the same thought in the following words For aught science knows, there may be no immortal intelligences but men in the wide creation. For aught she knows, the universe may only yet be beginning to be peopled, and earth have been selected as the first spot for the great colonization.' This was uttered in a lecture which, on copying out, and sending, in 1845, to a popular periodical, was refused admission on the express ground that we had contradicted 'analogy' in our theory. Hugh Miller, entirely ignorant of all this, or even then of our existence, that very year contended bravely for the truth that analogy is not identity.' Then came Whewell, with his host of answerers. Then, more lately, Baden Powell has tried to pursue a somewhat middle course, and seems to think he has made out that some parts of the universe are peopledthat others may be-that some decidedly are not-but that all shall be-statements which might all have been summed up in the previous words, 'great colonization,' since these imply that God's purpose is to colonize the worlds with intelligent beings, but is doing it gradually, in accordance with his usual plan of procedure. The Pantheists, on the other hand, whose God, as defined by one of themselves as 'unlimited life,' raised a yell when told that there were worlds upon worlds, where God, but not life, was. And there the matter rests, and shall rest for a long time, unless Sir David Brewster should act on Burns's idea 'But shortly they will cowe the loons; And stay a month among the moons, An' see them right.' Hugh Miller we only met twice, and these meetings took place in a |