Into a very different arena he was now to be drawn. Politically and ecclesiastically, it was a period of excitement. In 1829 Catholic Emancipation had no sooner been passed than O'Connell brought in his motions for the Repeal and the Tithe War. The latter was a protest by the Romanists against paying tithes for the maintenance of the Irish Church, whose incumbents were a mere outpost of the Tory and Episcopalian party, converting, as Lord Rosebery has said, nobody, and alienating everybody. On the withdrawal of Grey, and the fall of Peel, Lord Melbourne had carried on for years a sort of guerilla warfare with a varying majority, too dependent on the Irish vote to give general satisfaction. The Tithe Act, however, was passed, and this made the support of the English clergy in Ireland a charge upon rent. The position in which matters then stood with the Government will be clearly seen by a reference to the admirable speech of Macaulay, in May 1839, to the electors of Edinburgh. In Ross-shire, the tension of affairs had been rendered more acute by a wave of Tory reaction which induced the Church of Scotland to cast the weight of her influence against the Whigs; but the people, as has ever been the case upon such aberrations from the national policy, had steadily declined to follow this lead, although the endowment scheme for new chapels had been dealt with by the Whigs in a niggard and unsatisfactory way.
In Cromarty the cause of the Church was strong. Since the Revolution, the succession in the parish had been at once popular and able. The position taken up hitherto by Miller and his uncles had been a middle one. With strong hereditary attachment to the national establishment they united personal leanings which led them to a sympathy with the standpoint and the theology of the Seceders. But as yet Miller was, he says, 'thoroughly an Established man.' The revenues of the Church he regarded as the patrimony of the people; and he looked not unnaturally to a time 'when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end.' Still he confesses that as yet there were no signs of what he would himself have desired to see--a general and popular agitation against patronage--though he noted with approval the 'revival of the old spirit in the Church.' The time had, however, come when he could hesitate no longer. He saw with anxiety the decisions go against the Church in March 1838, and of the Lords in May 1839, the victory of his case by the presentee to Auchterarder, and the declaration of the illegality of the Veto Act of 1834. 'Now,' he says, 'I felt more deeply; and for at least one night--after reading the speech of Lord Brougham and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case--I slept none.' Could he not, he reasoned with himself, do something in the hour of danger to rescue the patrimony of his country out of the hands of an alien aristocracy, which since 1712 had obstinately set itself in hereditary opposition to the people? In the morning he wrote a letter addressed to Lord Brougham, the grandson of the historian Robertson, to which we shall have occasion later on to refer in detail. This admirable piece of reasoning and clever statement--the result of a week's work--was sent to Robert Paul, the manager of the Commercial Bank in Edinburgh. By him its value was quickly seen, and by the strenuous advice of Dr. Candlish it was at once put in print. Four editions in the course of well-nigh as many weeks proved its excellence; and it was fortunate enough to secure encomiums from two men so different in their leanings as Daniel O'Connell and Mr. Gladstone.