ea--a voice crying in the wilderness--a reed, but not shaken
with the wind--Edward Miall is an admirable illustration of what a man
with a principle may do. It was a bold step for him to give up the
pulpit and to start a newspaper; it was a still bolder thing to circulate
that newspaper in the Dissenting world, with unmistakable quotations from
Shakspeare staring you flat in the face, and to accustom that world, used
to a very watery style of composition, to language remarkable for its
elegance and power.

The effect was startling. Miall at once became the object of the
intensest hero-worship. The old idols were utterly cast out and
destroyed. Old gentlemen, who had led a pompous life for half a century,
suddenly found themselves of no account. Their power had passed away as
a dream. Students in Dissenting Colleges went over _en masse_ to this
second Daniel. It was a time of intense political excitement. The corn
laws taxed the poor man's food; Chartism reared its hideous head;
everywhere angry discontent prevailed. Miall thought the time had come
for Christian men to interfere; he felt that the struggle for political
rights was not inconsistent with the utmost purity of Christian life;
that the Church, by its sanction of existing abuses and its reverential
worship of the powers that were, had done much to alienate the popular
mind from Christianity itself; he felt that the Church, loaded with State
pay, would always be liable to suspicion, however excellent her creed or
pure her clergy; and he felt, therefore, that in asking men's political
rights, and the dissolution of the union between Church and State, he
should demonstrate to the world that Christianity meant something more
than corn-laws, or tithes, or the celebrated Chandos clause--something
more than a comfortable living for younger sons. It is false to suppose
that Miall left the pulpit when he left Leicester. His labours in his
new sphere were but a continuation of his labours in the old. In
everything he was unchanged. He was merely continuing his Leicester
work, appealing, not to a county-town, but to the nation at large. He
had changed his platform; but his mission remained the same. Instead of
using a feeble voice, he had recourse to a powerful pen. His pulpit was
the editorial chair, his church the English race.

Place Miall in the pulpit, and a glance will tell you the man. You can
see he has been brought up in a divinity college; he ha