'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? You tell us of "existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests." Do we not know that the slave-holders, who have so long and so stubbornly withstood your Lordship's truly noble appeals in behalf of the African bondsman, have been employing an exactly similar language for the last fifty years; and that the onward progress of man to the high place which God has willed him to occupy has been impeded at every step by existing institutions, vested rights, positive interests?' Bitter words, surely, all this for the ecclesiastical wirepullers of 1874, and inheritors of the policy of the Hopes and Muirs, when in approaching the Government with a statement of the intolerable strain of patronage, they tabled that same _Letter to Brougham_! To the last, Miller clung to 'the Established principle.' This need not seem wonderful. The Free Church he regarded as the Church of Scotland in all but the state tie, the more so that the coercion by the civil courts had not failed to impress him with the conviction that the Headship, as stipulated for the Scottish Establishment by the Treaty of Union, though defeated by Bolingbroke and lost in the stagnation of the eighteenth century, had passed as an integral part of her constitution to the Free Church. The difficulty attaching to his position proved an unfortunate source of tension between him and some of the leaders, and to this was due that lamentable quarrel with Dr. Candlish which he carried to his grave, and which perhaps broke his heart, for he was what Lord Cockburn had called their mutual friend Murray Dunlop, 'the purest of all enthusiasts' and though Miller triumphed absolutely, yet it was not in human nature to forget that the attack was, however sincere, an attack upon cherished convictions.