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 passages 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 superstitious 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 tithe 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 circumflexions and genuflexions, of garments and vestures, of ostentation and parade; that they took tithe of mint and cummin, 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:—­