orking reformer, and
certainly not an originator of reform. But it is less easy to excuse his
want of sympathy for the reformers themselves.

If there is one thing which Sydney Smith dreads and dislikes, it is
enthusiasm. Nobody would deny, at the present day, that the zeal which
supplied the true leverage for some of the greatest social reforms of
the time was to be found chiefly amongst the so-called Evangelicals and
Methodists. For them Smith has nothing but the heartiest aversion. He is
always having a quiet jest at the religious sentiments of Perceval or
Wilberforce, and his most prominent articles in the 'Review' were a
series of inexcusably bitter attacks upon the Methodists. He is
thoroughly alarmed and disgusted by their progress. He thinks them
likely to succeed, and says that, if they succeed, 'happiness will be
destroyed, reason degraded, and sound religion banished from the world,'
and that a reign of fanaticism will be succeeded by 'a long period of
the grossest immorality, atheism, and debauchery.' He is not sure that
any remedy or considerable palliative is possible, but he suggests, as
hopeful, the employment of ridicule, and applies it himself most
unsparingly. When the Methodists try to convert the Hindoos, he attacks
them furiously for endangering the empire. They naturally reply that a
Christian is bound to propagate his belief. The answer, says Smith, is
short: 'It is not Christianity which is introduced (into India), but the
debased nonsense and mummery of the Methodists, which has little more to
do with the Christian religion than it has to do with the religion of
China.' The missionaries, he says, are so foolish, 'that the natives
almost instinctively duck and pelt them,' as, one cannot help
remembering, missionaries of an earlier Christian era had been ducked
and pelted. He pronounces the enterprise to be hopeless and cruel, and
clenches his argument by a statement which sounds strangely enough in
the mouth of a sincere Christian:--

Let us ask (he says), if the Bible is universally diffused
in Hindostan, what must be the astonishment of the natives
to find that we are forbidden to rob, murder, and steal--we
who, in fifty years, have extended our empire from a few
acres about Madras over the whole peninsula and sixty
millions of people, and exemplified in our public conduct
every crime of which human nature is capable? What matchless
impudence, to follo