[3] The 'voice' of this now famous utterance was William Howieson Crauford, Esq. of Craufurdland.
'I am proud of my country, no other country in Europe could have done it,' said Lord Jeffrey. The Church had simply, in 1843, reverted to the precedents of 1560 and 1578, and had, in the simile of Goldsmith happily used by Miller on the occasion, returned like the hare to the spot from which it flew. Edinburgh, he maintained, had not seen such a day since the unrolling by Johnston of Warriston of the parchment in the Greyfriars'. There was a secession, not from the Church, but from the law courts, and temporary majorities of the Assembly. But the evil men do lives in brass after them, and the Act of 1712 had rent the Church of Scotland. No other country had been so fortunately situated for the exemplification of an unbroken and a National Church. It was left to two Tory Governments to ruin it, but opportunities once lost may not thereafter be recovered. Under the long reign of Moderatism it looked as if the _Nec tamen consumebatur_ were indeed to be a mockery. But the revival of national feeling at the beginning of the century, and the expression of popular rights in the Reform Bill of 1832, were waves that were destined to extend from the nation to the Church. The great book of M'Crie in 1811 had truly been fruitful of results. For a century Moderatism had reigned on a lost sense of nationality. But, as for long the history of Rome had been written with a patrician bias and an uneasy remembrance of that figure of Tiberius Gracchus, so through the influence of M'Crie the figure of John Knox had again risen to popular consciousness in Scotland. There they could see a greater than the Boyles, the Hopes, the Kinnoulls, the Broughams, and the Aberdeens. Yet, till its publication, the face of M'Crie had been almost unknown upon the streets of Edinburgh.
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.'