W. Keith Leask

“ 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. ”

“ There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. ”

“ The men of the opposition had 'nothing to draw with, and the well was deep'; and many names then blown far and wide by windy rumour, such as Dr. Cook, Robertson of Ellon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal Pirie of Aberdeen, survive like flies in amber only because it was their misfortune to be associated with great men. He might have said with Landor that he did not strive with these men, for certainly of them all 'none was worth his strife'; yet, though individually contemptible, they formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead resistance to argument and conviction. ”

“ The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness—these are the traditional marks of the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's perfervidum ingenium is surely much truer, and mere calculation is just what is not the national mark. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ To a nation believing that the divine decree of election has singled out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Professor Blackie has pointed out that the true secret of the vitality of the old Paganism and its logical internal consistency simply lay in the fact of the great humanity of the deities it created. This, also, as Miller himself no less clearly shows, is at the bottom of the enduring element in the lower reaches of Catholicism. 'There is,' says our Scottish Neander, Rabbi John Duncan, 'an old cross stone of granite by the roadside as you wind up the hill at Old Buda, in Hungary, upon which a worn and defaced image of our Saviour is cut, which I used often to pass. ”

“ That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold—an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation ”

“ When we consider the great amount of solid literary performance, and of minute observation, recorded in his Cruise of the Betsey and his Rambles of a Geologist, extending over the West Coast and the Orkneys—when we know that much of his work consisted of papers in The Witness, republished, like The Old Red Sandstone, in book form with the necessary additions, we shall wonder at the fertility and the quickness of the mind that could, in the midst of distracting journalistic demands on his time and attention, produce such a mass of varied and finished work in science and literature. ”

“ In science there are stars and stars, to borrow the adage of Thackeray upon men. There are stars that are fixed. In his own line of geology, as an inspirationist, we think his name will not soon pass away. There may be defects of knowledge, but there is no defect of spirit; and here we cannot do better than set down the opinion of his friend, Sir Archibald Geikie, who has a connection both with Miller and with Murchison through his occupancy of the Murchisonian Chair of Geology in the University of Edinburgh. ”

“ Facts like these and the presence of such men should go far to dispel much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. ”

“ Holy Alliances in recent times have not found this doctrine strange to them, and a high elevation of the prerogative and the mitre was the very breath of existence to a church whose being depended on the stability of the throne. Passive obedience was a convenient cry for those who never dreamed that the breath of the king could unmake them as a breath had made. Never till James VII. began to oppress the clergy did they begin to see what was logically involved in their abject protestations of loyalty, and in their professions of turning the right cheek to the royal smiter. ”

“ The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been a progress Godwards—not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the first to furnish a point of union; and occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the future.' Such an argument is indeed a reach above the vaguely declamatory theory of Swinburne of man being the master of all things, and above the theory of Feuerbach that finds God merely in the enlarged shadow projected by the Ego. ”

“ So entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land, Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is life in that great sea—invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. ”

“ Admirably in the Letter to Brougham does he seize on the ground of the political Liberalism of Scotland:—
'I, my Lord, am an integral part of the Church of Scotland, and of such integral parts, and of nothing else, is the body of this Church composed; nor do we look to the high places of the earth when we address ourselves to its adorable Head. The Earl of Kinnoul is not the Church, nor any of the other patrons in Scotland. Why, then, are these men suffered to exercise, and that so exclusively, one of the Church's most sacred privileges? ”

“ But the geological reasoning of Miller has the undoubted merit of being scientific and inductive. In geology the dominant note is, in one word, progress. 'There was a time in our planet,' and it will be noted that the argument is perfectly independent of the appearance of man, late with himself, early with Lyell, 'when only dead matter appeared, after which plants and animals of a lower order were made manifest. After ages of vast extent the inorganic yielded to the organic, and the human period began,—man, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One heavy sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter—it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits a while on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. ”

“ The history of Scotland in consequence becomes either, as Carlyle said, a mere hunting-ground for intriguing Guises or else is left to the novelist with the Mucklewraths, wild men, and caricatures. Even yet the mere English reader of Hume and Robertson has not got beyond the phrases of 'iron reformers' and 'beautiful queens.' The intrepidity of Knox, like the conduct of Luther at the Diet, becomes material for the sentimentalist to decry or the latitudinarian to bewail. ”

“ About the beginning of the present century the results of the French Revolution began to make themselves felt. Through the long war the price of provisions rose to famine price, and the impecunious Highland laird, like his more degenerate successor that battens on the sporting proclivities of the Cockney or American millionaire, set himself to the problem of increasing his rent-roll, and the system of evictions and sheep-farming on a large scale commenced. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot fail to be struck with the pertinence of his quotations and illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful memory and a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go to memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for his facts. ”