And the Succession? Did it abide with the Free Church or the residuary Establishment? Lord Macaulay will show, in his speech in the House of Commons on July 9, 1845, what the violation of the Treaty of Union had effected in 1712, and that 'the church of Boston and Carstares was not the church of Bryce and Muir, but the church of Chalmers and Brewster.' No one knew that better than Hugh Miller, and no one had done more to make the issues plain to the people of Scotland. To him it was 'the good cause,' as Macaulay in his address to the Edinburgh electors had styled his own. While a plank remained, or a flag flew, by that it was his wish to be found. It was the cry which M'Crie had said, 'has not ceased to be heard in Scotland for nearly three hundred years.' From his first leader in _The Witness_, of January 15, 1840, to the close of his life in 1856, he was to send forth no other sound. 'Your handwriting did my heart good,' he writes in a letter before us, of 9th October 1840, to his friend Patrick Duff in Elgin, 'and reminded me of old times long before I became ill-natured or dreamed of hurting any one. I am now "fighting in the throng"--giving and taking many a blow. But I am taking all the care I can to strike only big wicked fellows, who lift hands against the Kirk, or oppress the poor man.' Napoleon feared three papers more than ten thousand bayonets, and certainly Miller was a tower of strength not to be found in the adverse battalions. None of the merely 'able editors' of the Establishment party, much less the pamphleteers of the quality of Dean of Faculty Hope, could touch him or find a link in his armour. This was a tribute to character. 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. It was a time of great men. If Chalmers was the incarnation of the country and the movement, Murray Dunlop its jurist, Cunningham and Candlish its debaters, it was yet to the leaders in _The Witness_ that the great mass of his countrymen looked for the opinions of Hugh Miller. His relative, Dr. Gustavus Aird of Creich, the late Moderator of the Free Church, has informed us that in his own parish he learned the paper was read out in the mill, and that in many places the same thing took place. It is well to have the ear of the country, and it was well at the critical hour that there was a man found who was heard gladly of the common people. CHAPTER IV IN EDINBURGH--LAST YEARS