hed
services he has rendered to literature, science, and the Christian
faith. His loss is too heavy a one,--his removal has come upon us
too suddenly and too awfully for mind or hand to be steady enough
for such a task. The voice of the public press has already told
what a place he had won for himself in the admiration and affection
of his countrymen; and for the delicate and tender way in which the
manner of his departure has universally been alluded to, were we
permitted to speak in the name of Mr. Miller's friends, we should
express our deepest gratitude. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute
that his brother journalists have rendered to the memory of one who
was a laborer along with them in elevating the talent and tone of
our newspaper literature.
As Free Churchmen, however, it would be unpardonable were we to
omit all reference, at such a time as this, to what he did on
behalf of the church of his adoption. Dr. Chalmers did not err
when, self-oblivious, he spake of Mr. Miller, as he so often did,
as the greatest Scotchman alive after Sir Walter Scott's death, and
as the man who had done more than all others to defend and make
popular throughout the country the non-intrusion cause. We know
well what the mutual love and veneration was of those two great men
for one another whilst living; and now that both are gone,--and
hereafter we believe still more so than even now,--their two names
will be intertwined in the grateful and admiring remembrance of the
ministers and members of the Free Church. It was die high honor of
the writer of these hurried lines to record the part taken by his
venerated relative in that great ecclesiastical struggle which
terminated in the Disruption. At that lime it was matter to him of
great regret that, as his office was that of the biographer, and
not of the historian, there did not occur those natural
opportunities of speaking of the part taken by Mr. Miller in that
struggle, of which he gladly would have availed himself. And he
almost wishes now that he had violated what appeared to him to be
his duty, in order to create such an opportunity. He feels as if in
this he had done some injustice to the dead,--an injustice which it
would gratify him beyond measure if he could now in any way repair,
by expressing it a
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