He certainly was no half advocate or mere 'able editor' in the Carlylean phrase. If Chalmers, Candlish, and Cunningham were the leaders in the ecclesiastical courts, Murray Dunlop the jurist, Miller was the pen-man of the party. 'His business,' says Guthrie, the orator of the movement, 'was to fight. Fighting was Miller's delight. On the eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in a high and happy state of eagerness and excitement. He was a scientific as well as an ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less throwing away, his whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the interest of the controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his opponents by fresh matter in every succeeding paper. When I used to discuss questions with him, under the impression, perhaps, that he had said all he had got to say very powerful and very pertinent to the question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in nautical phrase, "Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet--ready for use, if it is needed"!' And that it was needed, in his own and the Church's interest, the pamphlets of abuse by which he was attacked, and which would form a small library, would remain to show. Thus he was really, all the more from his isolated position, as we shall see, indebted to what Professor Masson, in an appreciation of him in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for 1865, describes as the Goethean 'demonic element.' He had a better knowledge, he shows, of the country and its ecclesiastical history than was possessed by his clerical colleagues, and along with this went what he calls 'a tremendous element of ferocity, more of the Scandinavian than the Celt, leaving his enemy not only slain but battered, bruised and beaten out of shape.' This, though in a sense exaggerated, is true to the extent that he entered the lists not as a mere servant, but as a convinced defender of the liberties of the people. To touch on anything that infringed upon the Presbyterian history of the country--be it by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Sutherland, or other site-refusing landlords of the day, or by some flippant alien and Episcopalian pamphleteer among the briefless of the Parliament House, was certainly to court a bout from which the unwary disputant emerged in a highly battered condition. Yet his pugnacity was really foreign to the nature of the man. His surviving daughter informs the writer he was 'a very mild and gentle father, and his whole attitude was one depressed with humility.' It was, however, well for site-refusers and factors riding on the top of their commission from absentee landlords to feel that attacks upon their policy in _The Witness_ were not to be lightened by any hopes of an apology or by appeals to fear. 'The watchman,' he writes in a letter before us, dated 9th October 1840, 'is crying half-past twelve o'clock, and I have more than half a mile to walk out of town between two rows of trees on a solitary road. Fine opportunity