"The just man Jonah opened his mouth- They threw away their crowns and became lowly; And covered their heads with ashes; Robbers listened to Jonah, And men of rapine left that which was their own; For they cast off the fear of judges ; Judges also heard him and neglected their office; That from it he should reap salvation."* ECCLESIASTICAL INTELLIGENCE. Presentation.-The Queen has been pleased to present the Rev. Alexander Maclean to the Church of Croick, in the Presbytery of Tain, and shire of Ross, vacant by the transportation of the Rev. John Macdonald to the church and parish of Rogart. Presentation.-The Queen has been pleased to present the Rev. James Strachan, to the Church and Parish of Barvas, in the Presbytery of Lewis, and shire of Ross, vacant by the death of the Rev. John Reid. Presentation. The Rev. John M⭑Murtrie, assistant in St George's Church, Edinburgh, has received a Presentation to the parish of Mains and Strathmartin, vacant by the translation of the Rev. Mr Robertson to the High Church of Glasgow. Presentation.-The Rev. James Dougall, assistant minister of Cranstoun, has been presented by the Earl of Stair to the parish of Stoneykirk. Appointment. The Earl of Seafield has appointed the Rev. Mr Grant, Parochial Schoolmaster, Deskford, to the Church of Grantown, vacant by the removal of the Rev. Mr Allan to Grange. East Parish Church, Aberdeen.-The Rev. John M'Larg, Minister of the East Parish Church, Aberdeen, has accepted of the Parish of Fyvie. Ordination.-The Established Presbytery met on the 25th ult., in St Andrew's Church, for the public ordination of the Rev. James Struthers Douglas, as one of the missionaries of the Church of Scotland in Canada West. The Rev. Dr Arnot preached. The High Church, Glasgow.-On Thursday the 29th ult. a call was moderated in favour of Mr Robertson, of Mains and Strathmartin, the presentee to the High Church of Glasgow, in the room of the late Principal Macfarlan. Mr M'Lean of Calton, Moderator of Presbytery, preached and presided; and on the conclusion The Repentance of Nineveh, by Ephraem Syrus. Translated by Dr Burgess. of the services the call was very numerously signed. We understand that it will lie over for additional signatures for a few days. The induction is expected to take place early in June. University of St Andrews.-The inauguration of Mr J. C. Adams of Cambridge, to the Chair of Mathematics in the University of St Andrews, took place on Thursday afternoon, in the great hall of the College. The ceremony opened with a Latin prayer from Sir David Brewster, who then delivered a short address, in which he congratulated both students and professors in having secured the services of one so well calculated to give a new stimulus to the mathematical studies of the College. Mr Adams was formally declared Professor of the Chair of Mathematics, and received a cordial welcome from the Senatus. University Degrees.-The Senate of the University of Glasgow, have conferred the degree of D.D. upon the Rev. Mathew Bowie, minister of the parish of Kinghorn, and on the Rev. Norman M'Leod, minister of the Barony Parish, Glasgow. Died, on the 13th ult. the Rev. Dr Memes, one of the ministers of the parish of Hamilton. Died, at Ardrossan Manse on the 14th ult., in the 59th year of his age, and 29th of his ministry, the Rev. John Bryce, minister of Ardrossan. MACPHAIL'S EDINBURGH ECCLESIASTICAL JOURNAL. No. CL. JULY 1858. HUGH MILLER. We have no space, and we do not intend in this article, to review the life and writings of this remarkable man. Like Ramsay, Ferguson, Burns, and Hogg, in their poetic vocations, his name is as a household word among the artizans and peasantry of our land, charming their leisure hours with descriptions of natural scenery as poetically vivid as it is possible for words to make them, and drawing out the dullest of their classes to see wonders and instruction in objects of their daily but unnoticed observation. None of these genuine sons of inspiration care much about the stars, and they dwell little among the planetary worlds, which some of our moderns of the spasmodic school tread with so much ease and familiarity. The dews of morn, the daisy of the enamelled green, the chirp of the linnet, or the brawling of the brooklet as it rippled along the meadow-sward, and reflected the pebbly gravel, were the themes which gladdened their hearts, and whose pictures are so ineffaceably traced in the memories of every lover of the muse of song. Hugh Miller looked keenly and knowingly upon the clods and stones of the earth, by the highway and by the rivers' banks; and every thing under his magic touch becomes instinct with life, symmetry, and beauty. He lived himself among the rocks, and he thought every one else should do the same. the universality, to all orders of minds, of his fervid descriptions. Geology was the feeding element of his being. He grew apace, from boyhood to manhood, amid the pastoral and mountain scenery, where some of its choicest gems are stored; nothing under his rapacious appetite was barren or indigestible, of even its hardest and roughest substances. His hammer rung a note of intelligence from the flintiest mass, and his quick eye detected organic life in the immoveable rock; VOL. XXV. Hence and drawing sustenance and recreation wherever he bent his way, Hugh Miller closed a life of intense labour and application, as one of the most intellectually industrious of earth-born children, esteemed by the wise and learned, and the admiration as undoubtedly the ornament of the class whence he sprung. We have been unconsciously drawn into this comparison by the still vivid remembrance of the day we spent with him at Bathgate, on the occasion of the far-famed trial of the Torbanehill mineral; misnamed by the jury, misinstructed by the law, and greatly misunderstood by the community, but demonstrated indisputably by the subject of our sketch, to be, not a coal, but a SHALE. He was high in spirits, communicative, and instructing. He pointed to the banking-house, where for two years he deciphered with the pen the symbols of gold, whose substantial store-house in the rocks he so interestingly described in after years. He spoke of his early love of song, and of the actual preparation of a volume of poems, which his counsellor Principal Baird arrested in its journey to the press. He showed us the limestone whose curious organisms and fossil-shells first excited his wonder, and determined the direction and course of his future studies. But how singular and mysterious the revolutions of one's destiny-the beginnings-and the after-castings. Family privations converted in a moment the dreams of commercial grandeur, into the hard realities of mason-labour; the sunny south was exchanged for the tempest-beaten cliffs of Cromarty, and a poet's fancies transmuted into forms of life and organic structure more novel and exaggerated than the wildest conceptions of fiction. The anastasis of a buried world stood before him, clad in their armiture of scales and indistrustible tissue, the vegetable and animal myths of bye-gone periods; tribe after tribe, family after family rose on the vision of his geologic horoscope; and obedient to the willing implements of his skill, creek, valley, precipitous cliff, inland glen, and rocky shorehead, all laid their contributions at his feet and yielded their homage in the names and classification assigned them to the inspirations of his creative genius. Many years of elaborate research and reconstructive skill, spent not only in his native mountain district, but over the entire coast-line of the rocky north, the islands of the western and eastern Hebrides, and amid the oolitic limes and chalks of the south, Hugh Miller now appeared on the disputed field of mineralogical nomenclature to make his patient examinations; till, questioned by pragmatical counsel, and nothing awed by juridical wisdom, he fear lessly testified that an amorphous lump of clay, surcharged with bitumen and oils, was a shale and not a coal! His verdict has been stereotyped by the adhesion of a Leibeg, corroborated by the autho rity of an Ansted, illuminated by the microscopic light of a Quecket, and illustrated by the analysis and unrivalled collection of the coalspecimens of a Bowerbank. Though dead, he still speaketh; and his "Testimony of the Rocks" will be quoted in the future classification, in works of mineralogical science, of this unquestionably new substance, when legal decisions will be utterly forgotten. The writings of Hugh Miller are now in every body's hands, and they require no enumeration, varied as they are, and ranging over every branch of literature, science, and polemics, civil and ecclesiastical. We shall not pass our word for the soundness of all his opinions and the orthodoxy of all his speculations. The poetic temperament not unfrequently operated to the disadvantage of the philosophic precision of inference and reasoned truth. We cannot give our assent to his "vision" of the creative week, and his glowing representations of the introduction of the successive orders of organic life. We repudiate the assertion of a local deluge, and the clumsy machinery through whose agency he considers the miracle to have been effected. We cannot join in his views of the origin of sin, nor adopt his resolution of the existence of physical and moral evil into the principle of the "majus bonum," whether upon the ground of salutary terror, or the exercise of redeeming mercy. These matters-some of them-are beyond the ken of geologic research, and others of them no fathomline of genius can sound; and we do not think our author was precisely in his province, nor possessed of the sufficiency of theologic lore, where so many have stumbled, to attempt on the basis of geology any solution of the mystery of evil. His fame was established by, and still mainly rests on the "Old Red Sandstone," a work of new and marvellous facts narrated in a fascinating and easy style of diction, diversified by interesting and curious illustrations not usual in books of science, and for ever associating his name with the formation he so felicitously describes. The "Impressions of England" have fallen much into the background, and though composed with elaborate care -for some of the distinguished author's finest passages, are to be found in the volume-and enriched all over with striking descriptions of fossils and the upper series of the rock formations of the sister kingdom, still as a whole, this composite work of biography and science is neither so well conceived nor geologically arranged and executed, as to sustain the writer's reputation, or to have communicated much information to the reader. We have everything commendatory to say of the "Footprints of the Creator." It is truly a noble work, closely reasoned, more simple and forcible in its diction and style than any of the other books, levelling every outwork and inwork on which the baseless fabric of the "vestigian heresy" attempts a footing; rising in argument and illustration chapter after chapter as the demonstration advances, and closing in a grand pæan to Jehovah's praise, the Lord God of creation, of providence, and of grace. The "Testimony of the Rocks" is unquestionably the greatest of Miller's works, fullest in speculation, and the most elaborate in execution; but we are also bound to assert in truth, misty and unsound in many of its views and conclusions. The "Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble among the fossiliferous deposits of the Hebrides," is a charming little production cast in a different mould, more suited to the general class of readers, and bearing the full stamp and mannerism of the often too fanciful style of the celebrated writer's compositions. The author, in this work, literally revels amidst his favourite |