Leading Articles on Various Subjects

A church court can fail to settle what a dead man meant. Hugh Miller opens with the baffling dispute over Jansenius, then turns to a similar quarrel over Thomas Chalmers’s words.

In 1847, as Scotland’s Free Church debates how its schools should teach, Miller returns to Edinburgh after a long illness and sees a dangerous gulf between church leaders and ordinary members. The leaders imagine a vast educational scheme; the people, he argues, want skilled schoolmasters and may not support a plan that makes religious teaching their chief qualification. With government grants also dividing opinion, the dispute threatens more than a school system: it could leave the whole scheme insolvent. Miller believes conversations with Chalmers hold the key to the meaning of the disputed document. Can he make that meaning clear before the church’s plans come apart?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.