Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/336

Rh 318 M I L M I L The German and Swiss Reformers also believed that the end of the world was near, but they had different aims in view from those of the Anabaptists. It was not from poverty and apocalypticism that they hoped for a reforma tion of the church. In contrast to the fanatics, after a brief hesitation they threw millennarianism overboard, and along with it all other &quot; opiniones Judaicse.&quot; They took up the same ground in this respect which the Roman Catholic Church had occupied since the time of Augustine. How millennarianism nevertheless found its way, with the help of apocalyptic mysticism and Anabaptist influences, into the churches of the Reformation, chiefly among the Reformed sects, but afterwards also in the Lutheran Church, how it became incorporated with Pietism, how in recent times an exceedingly mild type of &quot;academic&quot; chiliasm has been developed from a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, how finally new sects are still springing up here and there with apocalyptic and chiliastic expectations, these are matters which cannot be fully entered upon here. But one remark ought to be made in conclusion. A genuine and living revival of chiliastic hopes is always a sign that the church at large has become secularized to such a degree that tender consciences can no longer feel sure of the.ir faith within her. In this sense all chiliastic phenomena in the history of the church demand respectful attention. But when attempts are made to find room for millennarianism in a dogmatic system, it must always assume a form in which it would be utterly unrecognizable to the millennarians of the ancient church, who, just because they were millennarians, despised dogmatic, in the sense of philo sophical theology. The claims of chiliasm are sufficiently met by the acknowledgment that in former times it was associated to all appearance inseparably associated with the gospel itself. Those who try to remodel it, so as to conserve its &quot; elements of truth,&quot; put contempt on it while they destroy it; for it was in its day the most uncompromising enemy of all remodelling, and it can only exist along with the unsophisticated faith of the early Christians. Of. Schiirer, Lchrburhdcr NeutcstamentlichenZc-itgeschichte, 1874, 28, 29 ; Corrodi, Kritische GeschicMe des CJiiliasmus, 1781. A thorough history of chiliasm lias not yet appeared. (A. HA.) MILLER, HUGH (1802-1856), eminent in science and literature, and one of the most remarkable among self- taught men of genius, was born at Cromarty, on the north east coast of Scotland, on the 10th of October 1802. His father, a sagacious and strong-willed seaman, who earned a livelihood by sailing his own sloop, perished at sea when Hugh was five years old. His mother looked much, in the upbringing of her son, to her two brothers, James and Alexander Wright, the one a saddler, the other a carpenter. Scrupulous integrity, sincere religion, unflagging industry, and resolute contentment were the lessons which these men, not so much by precept as by example, impressed upon the boy. But young Miller had inherited from his father a strong individuality and obstinate force of will, and began at a very early age to take a line of his own. The enchantment of open air and freedom the irresistible charm of mother nature on the hill and by the sea made him at thirteen an incorrigible truant; and his schoolmaster thought it likely that he would prove a dunce. Neverthe less the truant schoolboy was already giving indications of the destination of the man. At an age too early to date he had found in his pen a divining rod that led him to waters of inexhaustible delight. His mother summed up, in the singular dialect of the district, the impression derived from her son s boyhood and youth in the words, &quot; he was aye vritin.&quot; But the writing from the first, and increasingly as time went on, could be discriminated from the ordinary productions of boyhood. A continuity of idea, an inde finable grace and freshness, marked his performances. They were never bombastic or verbose. At no period of his life did he suffer from a flux of words. But, boy and man, he had a felicitous knack of fitting words into their right places and avoiding jerkiness and inequality. In verse he lacked the passionate intensity required for true rhythmic movement, but he had a fine sense of cadence and modulation in prose. It is a curious fact that what determined Hugh Miller to apprentice himself to a stone-mason was his delight in literary composition. Unemployed during the winter frosts, the mason, he perceived, could enjoy for some months every year the ecstacy of writing. One result of his decision was that he never learned any language but English. Another was that fifteen years of the quarry and the hewing-shed, with stern experiences of over-work and privation, sowed in his frame the seeds of incurable disease. Meanwhile the advantages of his decision were indisputable. Under the discipline of labour the refractory schoolboy became a thoughtful, sober-minded man. Miller always looked back to his years of hand-labour with a satisfaction that has something in it of solemnity and pathos. &quot; Noble, upright, self-relying toil,&quot; he exclaims ; &quot; who that knows thy solid worth and value would be ashamed of thy hard hands, and thy soiled vestments, and thy obscure tasks,- thy humble cottage, and hard couch, and homely fare ! &quot; It cannot be added that his fifteen years of close and constant intercourse with fellow-workmen inspired him with much respect for their class. He was most unfortunate in his comrades during the two seasons, 1824 and 1825, when he worked at Niddrie in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Swinish in their enjoyments, meanly selfish in their class ambitions, and fatuously subject to talking charlatans, that Niddrie squad of reprobates which he de scribes in My Schools and Schoolmasters stamped on the mind of Hugh Miller an indelible conviction of the inca pacity and degradation of the hand-workers. Returning to Cromarty, he worked in happy patience as a stone-cutter year after year, sedulously prosecuting at the same time the grand object of his ambition, to write good English. He found time to invigorate and enrich his mind by careful reading, and was habitually and keenly observant both of man and of nature. His reading was not extensive but well chosen, and embraced Locke and Hume ; Goldsmith and Addison were, more than any others, his masters in style. It was to get time to write that he had become a stone-mason ; another of the surprises of his career is that it was in advertising himself as a mason that he came before the world as a literary man. A stone mason, figuring as a poetical contributor to the Inverness Courier, might, he thought, be asked by some of the readers to engrave inscriptions on tombs. He therefore forwarded some of his verses to the editor. These seem to have been consigned to the waste-paper basket, which had been the fate of an &quot; Ode on Greece &quot; offered to the Scotsman when he was at Edinburgh. Piqued by his second failure, he now resolved, at all hazards, to see him self in print. In 1829 appeared the small volume contain ing Poems Written in the Leisure, Hours of a Journeyman Mason. It procured its author the valuable friendship of Mr Robert Carruthers, and was favourably noticed by the press. Miller looked at his poems in print, and concluded, at once and irreversibly, that he would not succeed as a poet. It was a characteristic and very manly decision, proving that there was no fretting vanity in his disposition. Doubtless also it was right. His field was prose. But, though his poems yielded nothing in the way of fortune, they were a beginning of fame. The simple natives of Cromarty began to think him a wonder. Some very elo-