w up such practice with such precepts! If
we have common prudence, let us keep the gospel at home, and
tell them that Machiavel is our prophet and the god of the
Manichaeans our god.

We are to make our practice consistent by giving up our virtues instead
of our vices. Of course, Smith ends his article by a phrase about 'the
slow, solid, and temperate introduction of Christianity;' but the
Methodists might well feel that the 'matchless impudence' was not all on
their side, and that this Christian priest, had he lived some centuries
earlier, would have sympathised a good deal more with Gallio than with
St. Paul.

It is a question which I need not here discuss how far Smith could be
justified in his ridicule of men who, with all their undeniable
absurdity, were at least zealous believers in the creed which he--as is
quite manifest--held in all sincerity. But one remark is obvious; the
Edinburgh Reviewers justify, to a certain point, the claim put forward
by Sydney Smith; they condemned many crying abuses, and condemned them
heartily. They condemned them, as thoroughly sensible men of the world,
animated partly by a really generous sentiment, partly by a tacit
scepticism as to the value of the protected interests, and above all by
the strong conviction that it was quite essential for the middle
party--that is, for the bulk of the respectable well-bred classes--to
throw overboard gross abuses which afforded so many points of attack to
thoroughgoing radicals. On the other hand, they were quite indifferent
or openly hostile to most of the new forces which stirred men's minds.
They patronised political economy because Malthus began by opposing the
revolutionary dreams of Godwin and his like. But every one of the great
impulses of the time was treated by them in an antagonistic spirit. They
savagely ridiculed Coleridge, the great seminal mind of one
philosophical school; they fiercely attacked Bentham and James Mill, the
great leaders of the antagonist school; they were equally opposed to
the Evangelicals who revered Wilberforce, and, in later times, to the
religious party, of which Dr. Newman was the great ornament: in poetry
they clung, as long as they could, to the safe old principles
represented by Crabbe and Rogers: they, covered Wordsworth and Coleridge
with almost unmixed ridicule, ignored Shelley, and were only tender to
Byron and Scott because Scott and Byron were fashionable idols. The
truth is, that