The Contribution of Sydney Smith

Extract

The Anglican episcopate in the House of Lords cut a sorry figure in the debates on Catholic Emancipation. To the last the bishops of the established Church resisted by vote and speech every proposal that would, as the Bishop of Bangor put it in 1808, place Catholics ‘on an equal footing with Protestants’; or, as the Bishop of Lincoln declared in 1828, ‘endanger the Protestant Establishment.’ Nor was the high churchmanship of the ancient university of Oxford more favourable to the civil rights of Catholics. John Henry Newman himself signed the petition against Catholic Emancipation—there were many of these petitions—and the university unseated Peel when he appealed to the electorate in 1829 as a supporter of Catholic claims.

But one distinguished clergyman of the Church of England, Sydney Smith, Canon of St. Paul’s, did most consistently and whole-heartedly champion the Catholic cause. With wit and humour, with knowledge and, above all, with a sincerity that lifted the argument above mere advocacy, Sydney Smith strove year after year for the accomplishment of justice. And he wrote so well that The Letters of Peter Plymley and the articles in The Edinburgh Review are capital reading to-day. A forceful writer, thoroughly well informed of his subject, sure of his ground and equally sure of the mentality of the people he addressed, Sydney Smith struck as skilfully and as fearlessly as Cobbett did at iniquity.