Sydney Smith Part 20

"I endeavour in vain to give them more cheerful ideas of religion: to teach them that G.o.d 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 be bright and cheerful, that led him, as far back as the days when he was preaching in Edinburgh, to urge the need for more material beauty in public wors.h.i.+p.--

"No reflecting man can ever wish to adulterate manly piety (the parent of all that is good in the world) with mummery and parade. But we are strange, very strange creatures, and it is better perhaps not to place too much confidence in our reason alone. If anything, there is, perhaps, too little pomp and ceremony in our wors.h.i.+p, instead of too much. We quarrelled with the Roman Catholic Church, in a great hurry and a great pa.s.sion; and, furious with spleen, clothed ourselves with sackcloth, because she was habited in brocade; rus.h.i.+ng, like children, from one extreme to another, and blind to all medium between complication and barrenness, formality and neglect. I am very glad to find we are calling in, more and more, the aid of music to our services. In London, where it can be commanded, good music has a prodigious effect in filling a church; organs have been put up in various churches in the country, and, as I have been informed, with the best possible effect. Of what value, it may be asked, are auditors who come there from such motives? But our first business seems to be, to bring them there from any motive which is not undignified and ridiculous, and then to keep them there from a good one: those who come for pleasure may remain for prayer."

When Sydney speaks of our "quarrel with the Roman Catholic Church," he speaks of a quarrel in which, at least as far as doctrine is concerned, he had his full share. Never was a stouter Protestant. Even in the pa.s.sages in which he makes his strongest appeals for the civil rights of Romanists, he goes out of the way to pour scorn on their religion. Some of his language is unquotable: here are some milder specimens:--

"As for the enormous wax candles, and superst.i.tious mummeries, and painted jackets of the Catholic priests, I fear them not."

"Spencer Perceval is in horror lest twelve or fourteen old women may be converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense."

"I am as disgusted with the nonsense of the Roman Catholic religion as you can be; and no man who talks such nonsense shall ever t.i.the the products of the earth."

"Catholic nonsense" is not a happy phrase on the lips of a man who was officially bound to recite his belief in the Catholic Faith and to pray for the good estate of the Catholic Church. A priest who administers Baptism according to the use of the Church of England should not talk about "the sanctified contents of a pump," or describe people who cross themselves as "making right angles upon the breast and forehead." But time brings changes in religious, as well as in social, manners, and Peter Plymley prophesied nearly thirty years before Keble's sermon on "National Apostasy" had started the second revival of the English Church.[176]

No one who has studied the character and career of Sydney Smith would expect him to be very sympathetic with the work which bore the name of Pusey. In 1841 he preached against it at St. Paul's.

"I wish you had witnessed, the other day, my incredible boldness in attacking the Puseyites. I told them that they made the Christian religion a religion of postures and ceremonies, of circ.u.mflexions and genuflexions, of garments and vestures, of ostentation and parade; that they took t.i.the of mint and c.u.mmin, and neglected the weightier matters of the law,--justice, mercy, and the duties of life: and so forth."

From Combe Florey he wrote:--

"Everybody here is turning Puseyite. Having worn out my black gown, I preach in my surplice; this is all the change I have made, or mean to make."

In 1842 he wrote to a friend abroad:--

"I have not yet discovered of what I am to die, but I rather believe I shall be burnt alive by the Puseyites. Nothing so remarkable in England as the progress of these foolish people.[177] I have no conception what they mean, if it be not to revive every absurd ceremony, and every antiquated folly, which the common sense of mankind has set to sleep. You will find at your return a fanatical Church of England, but pray do not let it prevent your return. We can always gather together, in Green Street, a chosen few who have never bowed the knee to Rimmon."

It may be questioned whether the Hermit of Green Street was very well qualified to settle the points at issue between the "Puseyites" and himself, or had bestowed very close attention on what is, after all, mainly a question of Doc.u.ments. In earlier days, when it suited his purpose to argue for greater liberality towards Roman Catholics, he had said:--

"In their tenets, in their church-government, in the nature of their endowments, the Dissenters are infinitely more distant from the Church of England than the Catholics are."

In 1813 he had intervened in the controversy which raged round the cradle of that most pacific inst.i.tution, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and had taken the unexpectedly clerical view that Churchmen were bound to "circulate the Scriptures with the Prayer Book, in preference to any other method." But he grounded a claim to promotion on the fact that he had "always avoided speculative, and preached practical, religion." He spoke of a "theological" bishop in the sense of dispraise, and linked the epithet with "bitter" and "bustling." Beyond question he had read the Bible, but he was not alarmingly familiar with the sacred text. It is reported[178] that he once referred to the case of the man who puts his hand to the plough and looks back[179] as being "somewhere in the Epistles." He forgot the names of Job's daughters, until reminded by a neighbouring Squire who had called his greyhounds Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-Happuch. He attributed the _Nunc Dimittis_ to an author vaguely but conveniently known as "The Psalmist,"

and by so doing drew down on himself the ridicule of Wilson Croker.[180] It may be questioned whether he ever read the Prayer Book except in Church.

With the literature of Christian antiquity he had not, so far as his writings show, the slightest acquaintance; and his knowledge of Anglican divines--Wake, and Cleaver, and Sherlock, and Horsley--has a suspicious air of having been hastily acquired for the express purpose of confuting Bishop Marsh. So we will not cite him as a witness in a case where the highest and deepest mysteries of Revelation are involved, and where a minute acquaintance with doc.u.ments is an indispensable equipment. We prefer to take leave of him as a Christian preacher, seeking only the edification of his hearers. In a sermon on the Holy Communion, preached from the pulpit of St. Paul's, he delivers this striking testimony to a religious truth, which, if stated in a formal proposition, he would probably have disavowed:--

"If you, who only _partake_ of this Sacrament, cannot fail to be struck with its solemnity, we who not only receive it, but minister it to every description of human beings, in every season of peril and distress, must be intimately and deeply pervaded by that feeling....

To know the power of this Sacrament, give it to him whose doom is sealed, who in a few hours will be no more. The Bread and the Wine are his immense hope! they seem to stand between him and infinite danger, to soothe pain, to calm perturbation, and to inspire immortal courage."

What is the conclusion of the whole matter? It is, in my judgment, that Sydney Smith was a patriot of the n.o.blest and purest type; a genuinely religious man according to his light and opportunity; and the happy possessor of a rich and singular talent which he employed through a long life in the willing service of the helpless, the persecuted, and the poor.

To use his own fine phrase, the interests of humanity "got into his heart and circulated with his blood."[181] He wrote and spoke and acted in prompt and uncalculating obedience to an imperious conviction.--

"If," he said, "you ask me who excites me, I answer you, it is that Judge Who stirs good thoughts in honest hearts--under Whose warrant I impeach the wrong, and by Whose help I hope to chastise it."

Here was both the source and the consecration of that glorious mirth by which he still holds his place in the hearts and on the lips of men. His playful speech was the vehicle of a pa.s.sionate purpose. From his earliest manhood, he was ready to sacrifice all that the sordid world thinks precious for Religious Equality and Rational Freedom.

[145] Eden Upton Eddis (1812-1901).

[146] Miss Holland writes--"His hair, when I know him, was beautifully fine, silvery, and abundant; rather _taille en brosse_, like a Frenchman's."

[147] Lord Houghton.

[148] A hostile reviewer of his Sermons quotes from them such phrases as--"Lays hid," "Has sprang," "Has drank," "Rarely or ever."

[149] See p. 90.

[150] I have not attempted to make a catalogue of these jokes. Such catalogues will be found in the previous Memoirs of Sydney Smith, and in Sir Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord Houghton.

[151] Hugo Charles Meynell-Ingram (1784-1869), of h.o.a.r Cross and Temple Newsam.

[152] (1808-1891), became 7th Duke of Devons.h.i.+re in 1858.

[153] This insinuation was quite unfounded.

[154] It is pleasant to cite the testimony of Lord Houghton, who a.s.sured Mr. Stuart Reid that he "never knew, except once, Sydney Smith to make a jest on any _religious_ subject; and then he immediately withdrew his words and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them."

[155] Spencer Perceval.

[156] Lord Hawkesbury.

[157] See Appendix E.

[158] William IV.

[159] Charles Richard Fox (1796-1873).

[160] Benjamin West (1738-1820).

[161] Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846).

[162] I am indebted for this tradition to the Rev. H.S. Holland, D.D., Canon of St. Paul's.

[163] John Allen was nicknamed "Lady Holland's Atheist."

[164] Bishop of Gloucester.

[165] Bishop of London.

[166] Bishop of Durham.

[167] Bishop of Peterborough.

[168] Quoted by Mr. Stuart Reid.

[169] _Praeterita_, vol. II. chap. ix.

[170] Jane Marcet (1769-1858), auth.o.r.ess of _Conversations on Chemistry_.