He was not a theist only, but a Christian. Here again, as in the argument from Design, he followed Paley, laid great stress on Evidences, and "selected his train of reasoning with some care from the best writers." He said;--"The truth of Christianity depends upon its leading facts, and of these we have such evidence as ought to satisfy us, 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:--