, till it appears that
mankind have ever been deceived by proofs as numerous and as strong."
Having convinced himself that the Christian religion was true, he was loyal
in word and act to what he had accepted. He remonstrated vigorously against
an "anti-Christian article" which crept into the _Edinburgh Review_; and
felt, as keenly as the strongest sacerdotalist or the most fervent
Evangelical, the bounden duty of defending the body of truth to which his
Ordination had pledged him.

It can scarcely be contested that his conceptions of that truth were, in
some grave respects, defective. The absolute dominion and overruling
providence of God are always present to his mind, and he urges as the
ground of all virtuous effort the Character and Example of Christ. But the
notion of Atonement finds no place in his thought. The virtuous will attain
to eternal blessedness, and the vicious will perish in their vices. The
free pardon of confessed sin--access to happiness through a Divine
Mediation--in a word, the Doctrine of the Cross--seems, as far as his
recorded utterances go, to have been quite alien from his system of
religion. The appeal to personal experience of sinfulness, forgiveness, and
acceptance, he would have dismissed as mere enthusiasm--and he declared in
his sermon on the Character and Genius of the Christian Religion, that
"_the Gospel has no enthusiasm_." That it once was possible for a clergyman
to utter these five words as containing an axiomatic truth, marks, perhaps
as plainly as it is possible for language to mark it, the change effected
in the religion of the Church of England by the successive action of the
Evangelical Revival and of the Oxford Movement.

Sydney Smith's firm belief, from first to last, was that Religion was
intended to make men good and happy in daily life. This was "the calm tenor
of its language," and the "practical view" of its rule. And, as far as it
goes, no one can quarrel with the doctrine so laid down. After staying with
some Puritanical friends, he wrote:--

"I endeavour in vain to give them more cheerful ideas of religion: to
teach them that God is not a jealous, childish, merciless tyrant; that
He is best served by a regular tenour of good actions,--not by bad
singing, ill-composed prayers, and eternal apprehensions. But the
luxury of false religion is, to be unhappy!"

It was probably this strong conviction that everything pertaining to
religion ought to b