This election decided the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, and the cause, for which Sydney Smith had striven so heroically, was won at last.  On the 28th of August 1828 he wrote to a Roman Catholic friend:—­

“Brougham thinks the Catholic question as good as carried; but I never think myself as good as carried, till my horse brings me to my stable-door....  What am I to do with my time, or you with yours, after the Catholic question is carried?”

To the same friend he wrote:—­

“You will be amused by hearing that I am to preach the 5th of November[93] sermon at Bristol, and to dine at the 5th of November dinner with the Mayor and Corporation of Bristol.  All sorts of bad theology are preached at the Cathedral on that day, and all sorts of bad toasts drunk at the Mansion House.  I will do neither the one nor the other, nor bow the knee in the house of Rimmon.”

On the 5th of November 1828, he wrote to Lord Holland:—­

“To-day I have preached an honest sermon before the Mayor and Corporation in the Cathedral—­the most Protestant Corporation in England!  They stared at me with all their eyes.  Several of them could not keep the turtle on their stomachs.”

The sermon[94] well deserved the epithet.  It glanced, as the occasion demanded, at the civil grievances of the Roman Catholics, and then it went on to lay down some simple but sufficient rules by which men should regulate their judgment on religious forms and bodies with which they do not sympathize.—­

“Our holy religion consists of some doctrines which influence practice, and of others which are purely speculative.  If religious errors be of the former description, they may, perhaps, be fair objects of human interference; but, if the opinion be merely theological and speculative, there the right of human interference seems to end, because the necessity for such interference does not exist.  Any error of this nature is between the Creator and the creature,—­between the Redeemer and the redeemed.  If such opinions are not the best opinions which can be found, God Almighty will punish the error, if mere error seemeth to the Almighty a fit object of punishment.  Why may not a man wait if God waits?  Where are we called upon in Scripture to pursue men for errors purely speculative?—­to assist Heaven in punishing those offences which belong only to Heaven?—­in fighting unasked for what we deem to be the battles of God,—­of that patient and merciful God, who pities the frailties we do not pity—­who forgives the errors we do not forgive,—­who sends rain upon the just and the unjust, and maketh His sun to shine upon the evil and the good.

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