The effect was startling. Miall at once became the object of the intensest hero-worship. The old idols were utterly cast out and destroyed. Old gentlemen, who had led a pompous life for half a century, suddenly found themselves of no account. Their power had passed away as a dream. Students in Dissenting Colleges went over _en masse_ to this second Daniel. It was a time of intense political excitement. The corn laws taxed the poor man’s food; Chartism reared its hideous head; everywhere angry discontent prevailed. Miall thought the time had come for Christian men to interfere; he felt that the struggle for political rights was not inconsistent with the utmost purity of Christian life; that the Church, by its sanction of existing abuses and its reverential worship of the powers that were, had done much to alienate the popular mind from Christianity itself; he felt that the Church, loaded with State pay, would always be liable to suspicion, however excellent her creed or pure her clergy; and he felt, therefore, that in asking men’s political rights, and the dissolution of the union between Church and State, he should demonstrate to the world that Christianity meant something more than corn-laws, or tithes, or the celebrated Chandos clause—something more than a comfortable living for younger sons. It is false to suppose that Miall left the pulpit when he left Leicester. His labours in his new sphere were but a continuation of his labours in the old. In everything he was unchanged. He was merely continuing his Leicester work, appealing, not to a county-town, but to the nation at large. He had changed his platform; but his mission remained the same. Instead of using a feeble voice, he had recourse to a powerful pen. His pulpit was the editorial chair, his church the English race. Place Miall in the pulpit, and a glance will tell you the man. You can see he has been brought up in a divinity college; he has all the prim and unfashionable air of youths reared in such secluded spots. His pale face tells of thought. You see in his small clear eye that thought crystallises in his brain. His clenched hand, his determined teeth, his shrugged-up shoulders, prepare you for the tenacity with which he clings to what thoughts come to him. On the hustings and elsewhere, Miall is the same—not elated when applauded, not depressed when reviled; unbending, imperturbable, mild of demeanour, yet inflexible in purpose. Yet, after all, his success has been more personal than in what he has done. Who ever talks of complete suffrage now?—yet that was Miall’s darling idea when he first appeared in the political world, and the Association which calls him father—which is to emancipate religion from the fetters of the State—it must yet be confessed by its most ardent admirers, has got a considerable amount of work to do.