Chapter V: Part 5

[19] We use this word according to its ancient meaning, as descriptive of the way in which the inspired soul of a prophet or a poet 'became possessed of his truths,' in distinction from his other function as an 'utterer of truths.' And we refer only to those poets who, as 'utterers of truth,' have spoken of the spiritual presences of nature, amongst whom, Wordsworth is chief.

[20] De l'Existence de Dieu. Part II. ch. i. s. 29.

[21] Theism, pp. 13, 14.

ART. III.--_Hugh Miller._--(1). _Life and Letters of Hugh Miller._ By PETER BAYNE, A.M. 2 vols. Strahan and Co. (2). _Works of Hugh Miller._ Nimmo.

What strikes us as most admirable in Hugh Miller is, that he was a man of genius and yet a man of sense. There has been, and will be, diversity of opinion as to the value or even the existence of his genius, but there can be no doubt as to the robust and masculine character of his mind. When we think of him we recall what Macaulay said of Cromwell, 'He was emphatically a man.' He possessed, in an eminent degree, that 'equally-diffused intellectual health' which can no more be acquired by effort or artifice than a sound physical constitution can be obtained by the use of drugs. So often, of late, has genius been freakish, whimsical, fantastic--evinced a perverse contempt for the moderation and equipoise of truth--substituted feminine vehemence of assertion for clear statement and rational inference--nay, seemed to hover on the very verge of madness--that we are disposed to accommodate ourselves to considerable defect in startling and meteoric qualities on the part of one who, while veritably possessing genius, was distinguished for sagacity, manliness, and the avoidance of extremes.

But was Hugh Miller a man of genius? We see not how any but an affirmative answer can be returned to the question. Metaphysical people may perplex themselves with attempts to define genius, but no practical evil can ensue from the application of the word 'genius' to qualities of mind, unique either in nature or in degree. It is correct to speak of mathematical genius when we mean an altogether extraordinary capacity for solving mathematical problems. It is correct to speak of poetical genius when we mean an inborn tunefulness of nature which awakens to vocal melody at the sight of beauty or the touch of pathos. When we say Hugh Miller was a man of genius, we mean that, take him all in all, in his life, in his character, in his books, he was unique. In a remote Highland village, one of the quietest, least important places in the world, amid a simple, ruminating population, with no Alpine grandeur of surrounding scenery or stirring memorials of local life, the sea-captain's son is born. Nothing in the history of his father's house for generations affords suggestion of an hereditary gift of expression; and though his mother had a fund of ghost-stories and delighted to tell them, she passed among her neighbours for an entirely undistinguished, commonplace woman. And yet, before he was ten years old, the child Hugh would quit his boyish companions for the sea-shore, and there saunter for hours, pouring forth blank-verse effusions about sea-fights, ghosts, and desert islands. A peculiar imaginative susceptibility and a passion for expression revealed themselves in him from his infancy. The strong bent of his nature regulated his education. He is bookish--his fairy tales, voyages, 'Pilgrim's Progress,' Bible stories, afford him enchanting pleasure--but he will pay no attention to the books which his schoolmaster puts into his hand. He is the dunce of the school, yet his class-fellows hang on his lips while he charms them with extemporised narratives, and in the wood and the caves he is acknowledged as the leader of them all. His mind is ever open; at every moment knowledge is streaming in upon him; but the whole method of his intellectual growth is conditioned from within, through the peremptory determinations of his inborn spiritual force and personality. At all hours he is an observer of nature, and acquires, without knowing it, a perfect familiarity with every living thing--bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, as well as with every tree, plant, flower, and stone, which are to be met with from the pine-wood on the cliff, to the wet sand left by the last wave of the retreating tide upon the shore. He thus grows up a naturalist. With a mind opulently furnished, and well acquainted even with books, he nevertheless finds himself, when his boyhood and early youth are spent, entirely unqualified to proceed to College. He chooses the trade of a mason, but the irresistible bent of his nature is obeyed even in this choice, for he knew that masons in the Highlands of Scotland did not work in the winter months, and in these he would betake himself to his beloved pen. For fifteen years he worked as a mason, earning his bread by steady, effective labour, but aware all the time of a power within him, a force of giant mould imprisoned beneath the mountain of adverse circumstance, which, he doubted not, would one day make itself known to the world. This vague prophecy in his heart, which surely was the voice of his genius speaking within him, was fulfilled. Sorcerers in the old time professed to show visions of the past and future in magic mirrors; but the true magical mirror is the mind of genius; and when Hugh Miller's contemporaries beheld, reflected in the mirror of his mind, lifted from the profound obscurity in which they had formerly slept and set in vivid clearness before the eyes of the world, the little town he loved, the Sutors, the bay, the hill, they felt that the one Cromarty man of all generations who had done this was possessed of genius. With this decision we rest content.

The true greatness of Hugh Miller lay, however, in his moral qualities. Here we may give our enthusiasm the rein. There was a rare nobleness, a rare blending of magnanimity, rectitude and gentleness, in this man. His affections were at once tender and constant, and when you search the very deeps of his soul, you find in it no malice, no guile, no greed, nothing which can be called base or selfish. We are struck with admiration as we mark the high tones of his mind, his superiority to all vulgar ambitions. There has probably been some romancing about the peasant nobles of Scotland, but in Hugh Miller, the journeyman mason, and in his uncles James and Sandy, the one a saddler, the other a wood-cutter, we have three men who, so long as the mind is the standard of the man, will be classed with the finest type of gentleman. It is greatly to the honour of Scotland, and of the old evangelical religion of Scotland, that she produced such men. Hugh Miller's uncles performed for him a father's part, and he learned from them, not so much through formal instruction as by a certain contagion--to use the phrase in which the Londoners, a hundred years ago, in their inscription on Blackfriars Bridge, described with felicitous precision the manner of Pitt's influence on his contemporaries--that sensitive uprightness, that manly independence, and that love of nature, by which he was distinguished. The ambition of money-making, which as it were naturally and inevitably suggests itself to a youth of parts in an English village, never seems to have so much as presented itself to the mind of Hugh Miller. In cultivating the spiritual faculties of his soul, in adding province after province to the empire of his mind, lay at once the delight and the ambition of this young mechanic. He aspired to fame, but his conception of fame was pure and lofty. Of the vanity which feeds on notoriety he had no trace, and cared not for reputation if he could not deliberately accept it as his due. A proud man he was; perhaps, at times, too sternly proud; but from the myriad pains and pettinesses which have their root in vanity, he was conspicuously free. Very beautiful also is the unaffected delight which this rough-handed mason takes in the aspects of nature. It has none of that sickliness or excess which strong men admit to have more or less characterised the enthusiasm for the freshness of spring and the splendour of summer of what has been called the London school of poetry. In the rapture with which Keats sang of trees and fields, there is something of the nature of calenture. Pent in the heart of London, he thought of the crystal brooks and the wood-hyacinths with a weeping fondness, instinct indeed with finest melody, but akin to that sick and melancholy joy with which the sailor in mid-ocean gazes on the waste of billows, gazes and still gazes until on their broad green sides the little meadow at his father's cottage door with its grey willows and white maythorns seems to smile out on his tear-filled eyes. Had Keats run about the hills and played in the twilight woods as a little boy, he would not have loved nature less, but his poetical expression of that love would not have struck masculine intellects as verging on the lachrymose and the fantastic. Nature to Miller was a constant joy, a part of the wonted aliment of his soul, an inspiring, elevating influence, strengthening him for the tasks of life. 'I remember,' he writes of the days of his youth,

'how my happiness was enhanced by every little bird that
burst out into sudden song among the trees, and then as
suddenly became silent, or by every bright-scaled fish that
went darting through the topaz-coloured depths of the
water, or rose for a moment over its calm surface,--how the
blue sheets of hyacinths that carpeted the openings in the
wood delighted me, and every golden-tinted cloud that
gleamed over the setting sun, and threw its bright flush on
the river, seemed to inform the heart of a heaven beyond.'

The mason lad who could feel thus had little to envy in the gold of the millionaire or the title of the aristocrat. Well did the ancients match sound and sense in that phrase, _sancta simplicitas_; such simplicity of soul is indeed holy and healing.

The sterling worth and fine moral quality of Miller are brought out in his relations with his friends. Of passion in the common sense he was singularly void, and there is no evidence that, until he passed his thirtieth year, female beauty once touched his heart. But his affection for his friends was ardent to the degree of passion, and constant as it was ardent. Both autobiographers and biographers are apt to paint up the youthful friendships of their heroes, and we are glad that Mr. Bayne has been able to verify, and more than verify, by infallible documentary evidence, all that, in his 'Schools and Schoolmasters,' Miller tells us of his relations to his two friends, William Ross and John Swanson. Ross was perhaps the most finely gifted of the three, but the circumstances of his birth were hopelessly depressing. His parents were sunk in the lowest depths of poverty; but this was not the worst; his constitution was so feeble that sustained and resolute effort was for him a physical impossibility. Amid the debility of his bodily energies there burned, with strange, sad, piercing radiance, the flame of genius. With exquisite accuracy of discernment he took the measure of Miller, pointing out to him where his strength lay and where his weakness. He knew his own powers, also, but saw that Miller had stamina while he had none; and, with tragic pathos, accused himself of indolence and vacillation, when his only fault was that he was dying. Delicately organised in all respects, he displayed a musical faculty more usual among peasant boys in Italy than in Scotland, made himself a fife and clarionet of elder-shoots, and became one of the best flute-players in the district. From the little damp room in which Ross slept during his apprenticeship to a house-painter, Miller used to hear the sweet sounds on which his soul rose for the time above all its sorrows. He had a fine appreciation, too, of the beauty of landscape. 'I have seen him,' says Miller, 'awed into deep solemnity, in our walks, by the rising moon, as it peered down upon us over the hill, red and broad and cloud-encircled, through the interstices of some clump of dark firs; and have observed him become suddenly silent, as, emerging from the moonlight woods, we looked into a rugged dell, and saw, far beneath, the slim rippling streamlet gleaming in the light, like a narrow strip of the _aurora borealis_ shot athwart a dark sky, when the steep, rough sides of the ravine, on either hand, were enveloped in gloom.' Ross had educated his faculty of æsthetic perception and of art-criticism by study of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Fresnoy's Art of Painting, Gessner's Letters, and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Lectures. Miller describes him as looking constantly on nature with the eye of the artist, signalising and selecting the characteristic beauties of the landscape. This habit of imaginative composition would, we believe, have been fixed on by the most accomplished instructors in the art of painting at this moment in Europe, as the best proof that could be given by Ross of the possession of artistic genius. Turner was at all times a composer, and never painted a leaf with photographic correctness. But the poverty of William Ross condemned him to the drudgery of a house-painter, and he had no teaching in the higher departments of art. He proceeded to Edinburgh, and thence to Glasgow, his fine talent distinguishing him from ordinary workmen, and enabling him to procure work of such delicacy that he could continue it when too weak to engage in the usual tasks of house-painting. Thoughtful and kind, he assisted a brother-workman who was dying by his side, and having shielded his friend from want, and soothed his last moments, he followed him speedily to the grave.

John Swanson was of a different build, physically and intellectually, from Ross. His characteristic was energy of mind and of body. He was a distinguished student at the University, an athlete in mathematics, an acute metaphysician; but the mystic fire of genius, which Miller saw in the eye of Ross, and which he believed to have fallen on himself, threw none of its prismatic colouring over the framework of Swanson's mind. He was the first of the three to come under strong religious impressions. Abandoning philosophical subtleties, and accepting, with the whole force of his robust mind, the salvation offered by Christ, he pressed upon Miller with importunate earnestness the heavenly treasure which himself had found. He was not at first successful. Steady labour, indeed, in the quarry, and in the hewing shed, had chastened the youthful wildness of Miller, and he had become, though not religious, at least reverent and thoughtful. As Swanson's appeals took effect, the early religious teaching of his uncles, which had probably lain dormant in his mind, asserted its influence. He does not appear to have been conscious of this fact, and indeed it was not the catechetic instruction, but the personal example of his uncles, that told upon him. At all events, after hesitating and playing shy, he was fairly brought to a stand by Swanson; and though he underwent no paroxysm of religious excitement, a profound change took place in his character, a change which penetrated to the inmost depths of his nature, changed the current of his being, and was regarded by himself as his conversion. He was thus knit in still closer fellowship with Swanson, and their friendship continued uninterrupted until his death. Had his opinions not taken this shape, it seems likely that he would have become daringly sceptical. He had assuredly, to use the words of Coleridge, skirted the deserts of infidelity. He was familiar with the writings of Hume, whose argument against miracles defines to this hour the position taken up by all who, on scientific grounds deny the supernatural origin of Christianity. There was a time when he fancied himself an atheist, and the profane affectation might have deepened into reality. But after his correspondence with Swanson, he never wavered. The consideration which, from an intellectual point of view, chiefly influenced him in pronouncing Christianity Divine, was two-fold. Christianity, he said, was no _cunningly_ devised fable. It offended man at too many points--it seemed too palpably to contradict his instincts of justice--to have been invented by man. At the same time, it was fitted, with exquisite nicety of adaptation, and with measureless amplitude of comprehension, to meet the wants of man's spiritual nature. Man neither would nor could have created it, any more than he could or would have created manna; but when he took of it, and did eat, he found that it was angels' food, making him, though his steps were still through the wilderness of this world, the brother of angels. Miller has not in any of his writings elaborated this idea with the fulness of exposition, defence and illustration which the importance of the part it played in his system of thought might render desirable; but it is obvious that it would, for him, not only silence the arguments which had previously seemed to tell against Christianity, but array them on the side of belief. The more offensive and contradictory Christianity might be to natural reason and conscience, the stronger would be the logical chain by which he was drawn to infer its supernatural origin. The courses of the stars might appear to him a maze of lawless and inadmissible movements, but when he steered his little boat by them, he was led safely across dark billows and perilous currents; clearly, therefore, One who understood the whole matter infinitely better than he had put together the time-piece of the heavens. Such was his argument, and it is not without force. Practically his religion consisted in an inexpressible enthusiasm of devotion to Christ. The term which he uniformly applies to the Saviour is 'The Adorable,' and he dwelt, with lingering, wondering, rejoicing affection on the sympathy of the Man Christ Jesus with human wants and weaknesses. Seldom have the efforts of friendship been more nobly crowned than were those of John Swanson when this radical change took place in the spiritual condition of Hugh Miller.

His relations with Swanson and with Ross attest the warmth and constancy of his affections; but the gentleness of his nature does not fully dawn upon us until we read his letters to Miss Dunbar, and understand the friendship which subsisted between him and that lady. She was many years his senior, and as the sister of a Scottish Baronet, Sir Alexander Dunbar, of Boath, and a Tory of the old school, we should have expected her to be shy of poetical masons. Something in Miller's verses, however, attracted her, and a singularly tender and romantic friendship sprung up between them. On his side, it was confined to affectionate appreciation and admiring esteem; but she wrote to him with the tenderness of a mother, and did not scruple to tell him that he was the dearest friend she had in the world. His letters to her are not distinguished by originality or by extraordinary power; but they abound in delineations of nature, poetic in their loveliness; they are just in thought, and faultless in feeling; and in literary style they are perhaps, on the whole, the most melodious and beautiful of his compositions. Like his other writings these letters are full of self-portrayal, and the face which, with pensive, fascinating smile, seems to beam on us from the page, is that of a right noble and loveable man. We feel that this mason is a gentleman; a gentleman of the finest strain; one whose gentleness is of the heart, and manifests itself, not in the polished urbanity of cities which often hides a bad and cold nature, but in a vigilant kindness, a manly deference, and above all a delicate sympathy. The few words of reference to Hugh Miller occurring incidentally in Dr. McCosh's recollections of Bunsen, and published in the biography of the latter--which, by the way, seem to us to cast a more vivid light upon the man than the far lengthier recollections of Miller by Dr. McCosh, printed in Mr. Bayne's biography--specify the intense sweetness and fascination belonging to his presence. Despite his rugged exterior, his shaggy head and rough-hewn features, his mason's apron, his slowly enunciated speech, and his somewhat heavy manner, this fascination was felt by all who had an opportunity of experiencing it.

We hinted that he was singularly devoid of sensibility to the charm of female beauty. In this respect he presents a marked contrast to Burns, and indeed to most men of powerful intellect and vivid imagination. But he loved once, and then he loved with all the intensity of his nature. At the time when his name was beginning to be known through the north of Scotland as that of one who had a future, Miss Lydia Fraser, ten years his junior, arrived in Cromarty. She was possessed of no small personal beauty, had received a good education, was addicted to intellectual pursuits, wrote fluently both in prose and verse, and was gifted with remarkable acuteness and clearness of mind. Her temperament was more mercurial than Miller's; he was more capable of patient thought, and, on the whole, more solidly able. It may be doubted whether a pair thus matched enjoyed the surest prospect of happiness in the married state, but it is evident that they were precisely in the position to strike up a romantic friendship. He was the literary lion of Cromarty, she the gifted beauty of the place; their friendship and their love were as much in the order of nature as that of Tenfelsdröckh and Blumine, though happily it had no such tragic conclusion. The gifted beauty could not help pausing in her walk to have a few words with the poetic mason as he hewed in the churchyard, his head sure to be full of some book or subject, his eye quick to catch every new light of beauty that fell upon the landscape. They soon found that they were more to each other than friends, and thereupon difficulties manifold interfered with their meeting. The young lady's mother was startled at the idea that her daughter should bestow her affections on a horn-handed mechanic, even though he had issued a volume of poems, a volume much praised, not so much bought, and already looked on almost with contempt by its sternly critical author. Miller, for his own part, had no wish to rise in the world. With a philosophy antique and astonishing in these restless times, he had arrived at the conclusion that the world had nothing to offer which would make him substantially happier than he was while hewing on the hill of Cromarty. Had he not the skies and the sea, the wood and the shore, and had not the whole world of literature and science been thrown open to him when he learned to read? His wants were perfectly simple, and exceedingly few, and were supplied to the utmost. He could be quite happy in a cave with a boulder for table, and a stone for chair, a book to read, and a pot in which to cook his homely fare; he might well be less happy, he could not be more, in a gilded drawing-room.

These pleasing but somewhat effeminate dreams were dissipated by his love for Miss Fraser, as a pretty little garden on the flanks of Etna might be torn to pieces by the heavings of the volcano. He would marry her into the rank of a lady, or he would not marry her, in Scotland at least, at all. If it proved impossible for him to rise in his native country, the lovers would seek a nook in the backwoods, and place the Atlantic between them and the conventional notions and estimates of British society. But the necessity for this step did not occur. Miller was offered a situation in a branch office of the Commercial Bank, which was opened in Cromarty in 1835. He laid down the mallet, not without satisfaction but assuredly with no exultation, and, after a brief initiation in the mysteries of banking at Linlithgow, entered on his duties as bank accountant. Too healthful and honest of nature to trifle in the discharge of any duties which he undertook, he addressed himself with vigorous application to the business of the bank, and found his new situation an admirable post for the study of human nature. It was in conveying the bank's money between Cromarty and Tain that he first carried firearms, a practice which he seems to have almost constantly maintained from this time forward. It was at the time of his joining the bank that his first prose volume, 'Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland,' was published. It contains passages of exquisite beauty, and has since attained to considerable popularity; but it was not immediately successful, and added little to the modest income of its author. His marriage took place in the beginning of 1837; he was then thirty-five years old, and had been engaged to Miss Fraser for five years.

Miller was a naturalist from his infancy, in the sense of habitually observing nature and laying up store of natural facts in his memory; but it was not until he had passed his thirtieth year, and until his severe self-censure pronounced him to have failed, first in poetry and secondly in prose literature, that he conscientiously and with the whole force of his mind devoted himself to science. His mental changes and processes were never sudden, and there was a transition period, during which he hesitated between literature and science; but when his resolution had once been taken, he cast no look behind. With intense, absorbing, impassioned energy, he gave himself to the pursuit of science. His experience in the quarry--of quite inestimable value to him as a geologist--determined his choice of a scientific province for special culture. His progress was wonderfully rapid. The geological nomenclature which he found in books served to classify and formalise knowledge which he had already acquired, and opened his eyes to the fact that he was a geologist. But for the interruption of his plans, by the agitation which issued in the disruption of the Scottish State Church in 1843, and his being summoned to Edinburgh to undertake the conduct of the _Witness_ newspaper, he would have published a treatise, on the geology of the Cromarty district at least a year earlier than the date at which he became known to the public as a man of science.

It reminds us how fast and how far the world has travelled in the last thirty years to note that, in the year 1840, Hugh Miller was an enthusiast for the State Church of Scotland. There are no enthusiastic believers in the State Church theory, or what Miller called the 'establishment principle,' now. The most logical and consistent members of the State Church of England avow that her chance of vindicating her claim to the name and privilege of a Church depends upon her ceasing to be a State Church; and the back of the Established Church of Scotland was broken by the disruption. Sensible men, with nothing of the revolutionist in their composition, are now generally of opinion that the days of both our ecclesiastical establishments are numbered. The opinion, also, would be generally assented to, that it is when viewed as a contribution to the cause of ecclesiastical freedom throughout the United Kingdom, that the disruption of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, in 1843, can be seen to be of historical importance. Of this Hugh Miller had no idea. He accepted the theory of a State Church, and he lent his championship to the Majority in the Scottish Church, when contending against the Court of Session, because he believed that the compact agreed upon between Church and State in Scotland, at the time of the union of England and Scotland, had been infringed. It would occupy too much space to explain fully to English readers how the State Church of Scotland had become endeared to the people, and was to them a symbol, not of oppression or of bondage, but of freedom. Suffice it to say that the Scottish Reformation of the sixteenth century was thoroughly popular, and essentially Presbyterian; that, in the seventeenth century, the cause of the Presbyterian Church was always the cause of civil freedom; and that, when the Church was finally established, after the expulsion of James II., she emerged from a long period of persecution, during which she had been regarded with reverence and affection by the great body of the Scottish people. Add to this that the lay elders, standing, as they did, on the same level of authority with the clergy in the Church courts, prevented the latter from becoming a mere clerical caste. It was an eminently felicitous circumstance for the Scottish Church, in the 'ten years' conflict,' that her dispute with the civil authorities turned on the rights of congregations. Her offence in the eyes of the Court of Session and the British Parliament, was that she had, in a manner deemed by them high-handed, asserted the right of congregations to have no ministers thrust upon them against their will. When we think of the profound indifference with which State Churchmen, in England, regard the whole subject of the settlement of ministers--when we observe the stone-like apathy with which they see dawdling youths purchase with a bit of money the privilege of consuming a parochial income and paralysing for, say thirty years, the spiritual life of a parish--we cannot but contemplate with a mixture of wonder and admiration the intense excitement which thrilled through Scotland when the Evangelical majority in the Church Courts stood up to vindicate the right of the people to be consulted in the choice of their pastors. It was into the popular side of the controversy that Hugh Miller threw his force. The right of the Church of Scotland to govern herself, a right unquestionably conceded to her at the Union, he distinctly maintained; but his most eloquent and effective pleading was in defence of the privileges of congregations. He contributed more perhaps than any other man, to secure for the Church in her struggles with the Courts, and subsequently for the Free Church, the support of the people of Scotland. Strange to say, though one of the principal founders of the Free Church, he had no glimpse of that future of ecclesiastical freedom of which, as we trust, the Free Church has been the harbinger. To the last he talked of the 'establishment principle' and the 'voluntary principle,' and fancied that some ineffable advantage would be derived by the Church from the State, if only the State could be induced to make a just league with the Church, and to stand true to its conditions. This was one of the weakest points in Hugh Miller's system of thought, and it must be allowed to have been a very weak one. If the disruption of the Scottish Presbyterian Church in 1843 proved anything, it proved that, even under the most favourable circumstances, the State Church principle will not work. If two ride upon a horse, one must ride behind, and if Scottish Presbyterians have yet to learn that the State, having established a Church, will sooner or later thrust it into a position of subservience and slavery, they may be pronounced unteachable upon that subject.

But it is was our intention to speak of Hugh Miller almost exclusively as a man of science, and we have lingered too long upon other phases of his history. His scientific talent was, we think, of a high order. It consisted mainly in an admirable faculty of observation, keen, clear, exact, comprehensive. He was habitually, and at all moments, an observer. Mr. James Robertson, a gentleman who knew him intimately and walked much with him in 1834, states, in some valuable recollections of Miller, contributed to Mr. Bayne's biography, that he, Mr. R., soon remarked how vividly alive he was to the appearances of nature, darting now at a pebble in the bed of a brook, now, at a plant by the wayside, never for one moment suspending his inquisition into the scene of wonders spread around him. Such being his habit of observation, two conditions only were required in order that he might become famous as a man of science, first that the district in which he pursued his researches had not been exhausted by previous explorers; secondly, that he possessed a literary faculty adequate to the communication of his knowledge. He was fortunate in both respects. The Cromarty district afforded extraordinary opportunities of observation in a department of the geological record until then but partially known. The Old Red Sandstone system had only begun to attract the attention of geologists. The Silurian system, below it, had been successfully explored; the Carboniferous system, above it, had been penetrated in all directions for its treasures of coal, and geologists had large acquaintance with its organisms; but the Old Red Sandstone had been comparatively overlooked. Miller found himself in the neighbourhood of good sections of the formation, and studied them with the utmost care and assiduity. His journeyings as a mason had made him familiar with the rocky framework of the north of Scotland, into which the Old Red Sandstone largely enters. He was able, therefore, on claiming recognition as a man of science, to tender a highly important contribution to the world's knowledge of one of the great geological systems. His name is imperishably inscribed among the original workers in the Old Red Sandstone, along with those of Sedgwick, Agassiz, and Murchison. His specific contribution was connected with the ichthyic organisms of the system, and no contribution could have been more important. The Old Red Sandstone system is distinguished, biologically, as that in which the vertebrate kingdom, in its lowest or fish division, was first prominently developed; and the most niggardly estimate of the achievement of Miller, as a geologist, must recognise that the discoverer of Pterichthys first called the attention of scientific men to the enormous wealth of the Old Red Sandstone in fish. If this is so, it will be difficult to refuse the addition that he determined the character of the formation. There are fish in the upper beds of the Silurian system, but the characteristic organisms are molluscan and crustacean; there are traces of reptile existence in the Old Red, but its characteristic organisms are fish.

Unquestionably, the sudden rise of Miller into eminence and reputation as a geologist, was due, in some measure, to the exquisite clearness and picturesqueness of his style. From his boyhood he had made it one of his chief aims to perfect his literary workmanship. He had striven to attain skill in writing, as an enthusiastic painter strives to attain skill in the technical art of realising form and laying on colour. His descriptions of fossil organisms surprised and delighted scientific men, while the imaginative boldness and breadth with which he depicted the landscapes of the remote past fascinated general readers. After all, it maybe doubted whether the extreme elaboration and minuteness with which he described individual organisms, such as the Pterichthys, was not labour lost. A carefully executed wood-cut conveys a more correct and impressive idea of the creature than any words which could be devised. At all events, the descriptions of fossil organisms in the works of Hugh Miller are as exact and vivid as any in the English language.

We spoke of the sincerity and earnestness of his religion. He had in fact that quality of the true man, that he could be nothing by halves. His religion was what genuine religion always is, a fire warming his whole nature, and mingling with every operation of his mind. He was thoroughly acquainted with the works of Hume, and had felt their subtle and searching power. He had skirted, as we said, the howling solitudes of infidelity, and now having, as he devoutly believed, been led by a Divine hand to the green pastures and living waters and healthful, habitable lands of faith, the central ambition of his life, never asleep in his breast, was to lead others to the refuge which he had found. He could not read in God's book of nature without thinking of God, and endeavouring to trace the marks of His finger, and looking for smooth stones to be put into his sling, and aimed at the foreheads of the enemies of the faith. He had no sooner mastered the logic of geology, and formed a conception of the platforms of life which have been unveiled by the science in the remoteness of the past, than he began to perceive, or think that he perceived, certain positions afforded by it, which the defender of revealed religion might take up with much advantage in carrying on the conflict with infidelity. Of these, the best known is his scheme for reconciling the Mosaic account of the creation of the heavens and the earth with the conclusions of geologic science. This subject is disposed of in the 'Life and Letters' in a single sentence; we think it deserved, and propose to devote to it, more space and attention.

Miller frankly avowed that the view which he originally held as to the scientific interpretation of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis had been modified. He had believed, with Chalmers and Buckland, that the six days were natural days of twenty-four hours each; that the operations performed in them had reference to the world as inhabited by man; that a 'great chaotic gap' separated the 'latest of the geologic ages' from the human period; and the Scripture contained no account whatever of those myriads of ages during which the several geological formations came into the state in which we now find them. As his geological knowledge extended, and in particular, when he engaged in close personal inspection of the Tertiary and Post-tertiary formations, he perceived that the hypothesis of a chaotic period, dividing the present from the past, in the history of our planet, was untenable. 'No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness,' thus he announces the result of his investigations, 'separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyæna; for familiar animals, such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild-cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their times with our own; and so I have been compelled to hold that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, and stretched far back into the bygone eternity.'

It was legitimate for theologians, sixty years ago, to put their trust in the theory of a chaotic state of the planet immediately before the commencement of the human period, and to allege that Scripture had folded up all reference to preceeding geological ages, in the words 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' The authority of Cuvier was then supreme in the world of science, and Cuvier held that 'not much earlier than 5,000 or 6,000 years ago' the surface of the globe underwent a sudden and subversive catastrophe. But no theologian who now maintains this hypothesis can place his theology on a level with the scientific acquirement of the day. Dr. Kurtz is the only theologian of any standing who is known to us as still holding the view of Chalmers; and if we were asked how a person accurately acquainted with geological science might best obtain a conception of the untenability of the theory of a recent chaos, we should advise him to read Dr. Kurtz's defence of the hypothesis. The German divine repeatedly specifies 6,000 years as the period during which man and the existing order of terrestrial beings have occupied our planet. 'According to the Scriptures,' he says, 'the present order of things has existed for nearly 6,000 years.' He has a theory of his own on the subject of fossils. 'The types buried in the rocks were not destined to continue perpetually, or else have not attained their destination.' They were mere transient phenomena. It would be difficult to put into language a proposition more inconsistent with geological fact. The species of the Silurian mollusca have changed, but mollusca of Silurian type abound at this hour. Evidence amounting almost to absolute demonstration identifies the _globigerina_ of the Atlantic mud of to-day with the _globigerina_ of the Cretaceous system; and Sir Charles Lyell calculates that the Cretaceous system came to an end 80,000,000 years ago. Pronouncing the types of the past evanescent, Dr. Kurtz pronounces the type of the present permanent. The creatures called into existence on the six days of Genesis, which last he holds to have been natural days, 'were intended to continue, and not to perish, and their families were not to be petrified in strata, but each individual was to decay in the ordinary manner, so that their bones have mostly passed away without leaving any trace.' This is a pure imagination. There is no reason to believe that the petrifactive agencies are less active at present than they were in by-gone geological epochs. The essential and irreconcilable discrepancy, however, between the views of Dr. Kurtz and the conclusions of geology, consists in his assumption of a universal deluge, sweeping away all life, and leaving the surface of the world a _tabula rasa_, immediately before the appearance of man. He speaks of 'a flood, which destroyed and prevented all life, and after the removal of which the present state of the earth, with its plants, animals, and man, was immediately restored.' With marvellous simplicity he declares that 'the only thing' he 'demands,' 'and which no geological theory _can_ or _will_ deny,' is that 'the globe was covered with water' before the appearance of man 'and the present plants and animals.' There is no geologist deserving the name at present alive who would admit this proposition; and we suppose that a large majority of living geologists would maintain that the earth has certainly not been covered with water since the time of those forests whose remains are preserved for us in Devonian strata. To name one among many proofs, the state of the fauna of the Atlantic islands, Madeira and the Desertas, demonstrates that the earth has not been enveloped by the ocean for a period compared with which Dr. Kurtz's 6,000 years dwindle into insignificance. Geology pronounces as decisively against the occurrence of a universal chaos upon earth 6,000 years ago as against the accumulation of all the strata of the earth's crust in six natural days. There is no sense recognisable by geological science in which the word 'beginning' can be applied to the condition presented by the surface of the earth at any period nearly so recent as 6,000 years ago.

According to the theory of Mosaic geology ultimately adopted by Hugh Miller, the 'beginning' spoken of in the first verse of the Bible corresponds to that period when the planet, wrapt in primeval fires, was about to enter upon the series of changes which is inscribed in the geologic record. The chaos, dark and formless, which preceded the dawn of organic existence upon earth, was no temporary inundation, no miraculous catastrophe, but an actual state of things of which the evidence still exists in the rocks. Strictly speaking, indeed, the term 'chaos' has no scientific meaning. Science is acquainted with no period in time, no locality in space, where there has been a general suspension of law; and it may be worthy of remark that, although Scripture speaks of the original state of things as without form and void, there is no hint that it was beyond control of Divine and natural ordinance. Relatively to man, however, and to those changes in the structure and organisms of the planet which the geologist chronicles, the fiery vesture, in which advocates of the Age theory of reconciliation between Genesis and geology allege the earth to have been at one time enveloped, constitutes an interruption to all research, a commencement of all that can be called scientific discovery. If it could be shown that the first chapter of Genesis contains an intelligible and accurate account of the changes which have taken place in the crust of the earth from the time when form first rose out of formlessness, and light sprang from darkness, to the time when man began to build his cities and till his fields, no candid judge would refuse to admit that the problem presented by the chapter had been satisfactorily solved, and that the chapter itself formed a sublimely appropriate vestibule to the temple of Revelation.

Let us state Miller's conception of the meaning and scientific purport of the first chapter of Genesis in his own words:--

'What may be termed,' we quote from the _Testimony of the
Rocks_, 'the three geologic days--the third, fifth, and
sixth--may be held to have extended over those
Carboniferous periods during which the great plants were
created--over those Oolitic and Cretaceous periods during
which the great sea-monsters and birds were created--and
over those Tertiary periods during which the great
terrestrial mammals were created. For the intervening, or
fourth day, we have that wide space represented by the
Permian and Triassic periods, which, less conspicuous in
their floras than the periods that went immediately before,
and less conspicuous in their faunas than the periods that
came immediately after, were marked by the decline and
ultimate extinction of the Palæozoic forms, and the first
partially developed beginnings of the secondary ones. And
for the first and second days there remains the great Azoic
period, during which the immensely developed gneisses,
mica-schists, and primary clay-slates were deposited, and
the two extended periods represented by the Silurian and
Old Red Sandstone system. These, taken together, exhaust
the geological scale, and may be named in their order as,
first, the Azoic day or period; second, the Silurian, or
Old Red Sandstone day, or period; third, the Carboniferous
day, or period; fourth, the Permian or Triassic day, or
period; and sixth, the Tertiary day, or period.'

It is important to observe that Miller here expressly fits into his scheme the work of the six days. In another passage he remarks that it is specifically his task, as a geologist, to account for the operations of the third, fifth, and sixth days, and this circumstance has occasioned the mistake, which has crept into so respectable a work as Smith's 'Dictionary of the Bible,' that he did not profess to explain the creative proceedings of the first, second, and fourth days. In the passage we have quoted he assigns to each successive day its distinctive character and work. The entire scheme, then, may be thrown into a single sentence. A beginning of formlessness and fire, indefinite in duration; a first and second day, not discriminated by Miller from each other, during which light, though created, did not reach, the surface of our planet, but gradually struggled through the thick enveloping canopy of steam rising from a boiling ocean; a third day, in which an enormous development of vegetable life took place, a development due in part to the warm and humid atmosphere, which no clear sunbeam could as yet penetrate; a fourth day, marked by the emergence of sun, moon, and stars in unclouded splendour, but by no striking phenomena of organic life; a fifth day, in which the most imposing features in the creative procession were sea-monsters and birds; and a sixth day, in which huge mammals crowded the stage of existence, and man appeared. Each of these days is, of course, supposed to have occupied an indefinite number of years.

It is obviously the principle or method of this scheme of reconciliation between Genesis and geology to look for points in the Mosaic narrative which correspond with the facts revealed by geology. The words in the Scriptural account are few; are they so express, vivid, and characteristic that they epitomise, as in a Divine telegram, the geological history of millions of years? A consummate artist looks upon a face and throws a few strokes, quick as lightning, upon his canvas. The countenance seems to live. Revealings of character, which we might have required years to trace, flash on us from the eye, and chronicles of passion are written in a speck of crimson on the lip. The portrait is only a sketch; weeks or months might be spent in elaborating its colour, and perfecting its gradation of light and shade; but not less on this account, does it accurately correspond with the original, and show the man to those who knew him. The advocates of the Age theory of Mosaic geology maintain that, few as are the touches in the pictured history of the world in the first chapter of Genesis, the geologist can recognise them as unmistakeably true to the facts of the past. The correspondence alleged to exist has been illustrated in yet another fashion. Look upon a mountainous horizon, in the far distance, on a clear day, and you perceive a delicate film of blue or pearly grey, relieved against the sky. The outline of that film, faint though it be, is, for every kind of mountain range, more or less characteristic. The horizon line of the primaries will be serrated, peaked, and jagged. The horizon line of the metamorphic hills, though fantastic, will have more of curve and undulation. The horizon of the tertiaries will be in long sweeps, and tenderly modulated, far-stretching lines. Those minute jags and points of the primaries are dizzy precipices and towering peaks. The glacier is creeping on under that filmy blue; the avalanche is thundering in that intense silence. Rivers that will channel continents and separate nation from nation, bound along in foaming cataracts, where you perceive only that the tender amethyst of the sky has taken a deeper tinge. That undulating line of the crystalline hills tells of broad, dreary moors, dark, sullen streams, sparse fields of stunted corn. That sweeping, melting, waving line of the tertiaries tells of stately forest and gardened plain, of lordly mansions and bustling villages. The Mosaic record, as interpreted by the advocates of the Age theory, gives the _horizon lines_ of successive geological eras. Its descriptions, they maintain, are correct, viewed as horizon lines. They convey the largest amount of knowledge concerning the several periods which could possibly be conveyed under the given conditions. Such is the method or logic of the Age theory of Mosaic geology; and it is manifest that, whatever may be its scientific value, it is no more to be refuted by the mention of geological facts which the Mosaic record, does not specify, than the accuracy of a map, constructed on the scale of half an inch to the hundred miles, would be impugned by proving that it omitted a particular wood, rock, hill, or village.

It is indispensable to the establishment of this theory, that the geological changes which the earth has undergone, shall admit of being arranged in certain divisions. The lines of demarcation between these may be drawn within wide limits of variation; but should it become an unquestioned truth of geologic science that absolute uniformity of phenomena has reigned in our world so long as the geologist traces its history, the Age theory would be untenable. The theory does not require that the 'solutions of continuity' should be abrupt or catastrophic. On the contrary, the 'morning' and' evening' of the Mosaic record suggest gradation; and the pause of night, with its silence, its slumber, its gathering up of force for new outgoings of the creative energy, by no means suggests cataclysm or revolution. But the days or periods, though they may melt into each other with the tender modulation of broad billows on a calming sea, must possess a true differentiation, and cannot be accepted by those who believe in absolute geological uniformitarianism. We are not sure, however, that any geologists profess this creed, and the views propounded by very eminent geologists on the nature of the changes which have taken place on the earth appear to us to satisfy the requirements of the Age theory, in respect of division and succession. In the sixth edition of his 'Elements of Geology' Sir Charles Lyell writes thus:--'Geology, although it cannot prove that other planets are peopled with appropriate races of living beings, has demonstrated the truth of conclusions scarcely less wonderful--the existence on our planet of so many habitable surfaces, or worlds as they have been called, each distinct in time, and peopled with its peculiar races of aquatic and terrestrial beings.' He proceeds to state that living nature, with its inexhaustible variety, displaying 'infinite wisdom and power,' is 'but the last of a great series of pre-existing creations.' Mr. Darwin, in the fourth edition of his 'Origin of Species,' makes the weighty remark that 'scarcely any palæontological discovery is more striking than the fact, that the forms of life change almost simultaneously throughout the world.' Qualifying his words by the statement that they apply chiefly to marine forms of life, and that the simultaneity referred to, does not necessarily fall within 'the same thousandth or hundred-thousandth year,' he writes as follows:--