“A merrier man Within the limit of becoming mirth I never spent an hour’s talk withal.” _Love’s Labour’s Lost._ It was not in Norfolk that I met the Rev. Joseph Miller, Hon. Canon of his Cathedral, Rural Dean, and formerly Fellow and Tutor of some College in Oxford. Having at one time or another inspected schools in ten different counties I may leave the venue uncertain. It is merely for convenience that I record the visit here. At the time when I made his acquaintance, he had acquired some notoriety in clerical circles in a singular way. In those days--I know not whether the rule is altered--the Bampton Lecturer at Oxford was appointed by a committee: there was a list of subjects to which the lecturer was confined, and any one who felt a call to the University pulpit sent in his application, specifying the particular subject upon which he was moved to discourse. Miller proposed to give a course of lectures on “The Failure of Moses.” I suppose he sent in a syllabus with his application: but possibly the syllabus which he showed me was made merely for his own use. The argument, briefly stated, was that in spite of the divine and miraculous assistance which it enjoyed; in spite of the purity and simplicity of its doctrines, the Mosaic system had never up to the time of the Captivity spread over even the little country of Palestine. Assuming the correctness of the popular chronology, there was an interval of 881 years between the Exodus and the Captivity, and at no time during that period was the country as a whole free from gross idolatry. But after the return from the Captivity idolatry seems to have disappeared in the course of years; at least there is no mention of it in the Gospels. To what was this change due? Clearly to the introduction from the East of the doctrine of a future life, with future rewards and punishments. Moses and his followers (said the Canon) promised temporal prosperity to the righteous, and in the end ruin to the ungodly. This was not the common experience, and the people, seeming to gain little by virtue in this world, and having no hope for another, tried other forms of worship, which combined pleasure with religion. Solomon, who was strong enough to enforce uniformity, became the founder of the doctrines of Religious Equality and Concurrent Endowment, and applied them to his own household. Then came the schism, and things became worse. Miller’s description of Jeroboam as the first Home Ruler, the parent of Free Churches, would have convulsed the undergraduate gallery. The lectures would have set Oxford in an uproar between the Torpids and the Eights, and when published in the following year would have filled the _Guardian_ and the _Spectator_ with correspondence. They would eventually have attracted the attention of Convocation, and _odium theologicum_ would have blossomed into a _gravamen_, or even an _articulus cleri_.