It does seem strange that so pale, calm, unmoved a man as Mr. Miall seems to be, should have wandered out of the pulpit and the study, with its old books and everlasting commentaries, and exchanged all that elysian dream-land for the fever of politics and the bustle of the newspaper. It seems stranger still that he should have succeeded, that he should have found favour with our turbulent democracy, not partial to the use of soap, or particularly passionate in their attachment to abstract principles. Strangest of all is it that he should have managed to be returned as an M.P. We should have been the last to have prophesied for Miall such a career. Cato at the theatre, Colonel Sibthorp at a Peace Congress, an Irish patriot speaking common-sense, could not surprise us more. Yet that Miall has achieved what he has, shows how much may be done by the possessor of a principle. Miall is a principle, an abstract principle embodied—that man is everything, that the human being is divine, that the inspiration of the Almighty has given the meanest of us understanding. From the Bible he got that principle, and that is the unerring test by which every case is weighed and every difficulty solved. In religion it led him to reject ecclesiastical organisations and claims, the traditions of the Fathers, the pretensions of divines—everything by which the priest is exalted and the people kept down. In politics, the same rule held good. If all men are equal—if God has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth—what need for aristocratic usurpation or the legislation of a class? If all are equal before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth. How it was doubted some few years since, only men like Miall can tell. Miall’s Anti-State-Churchism was also obtained by a similar process. If there were no need of priests, if every man could be a priest unto God, what need of State patronage and pay? At the best they could but corrupt and enervate the Church. It was teaching it to rely on a worthless arm of flesh rather than on the living God.