“They all burst into tears.  It flung me also into a great agitation, and I wept and groaned for a long time.  Then I rose, and said I thought it was very likely to end in their keeping a buggy, at which we all laughed as violently.  The poor old lady, who was sleeping in a garret because she could not bear to enter into the room lately inhabited by her husband, sent for me and kissed me, sobbing with a thousand emotions.  The charitable physician wept too....  I never passed so remarkable a morning, nor was more deeply impressed with the sufferings of human life, and never felt more thoroughly the happiness of doing good.”

Of all his various remedies against melancholy, the one on which he most constantly and most earnestly insisted, was the wisdom of “taking short views,”—­

“Dispel,” he said, “that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence.  We know nothing of to-morrow:  our business is to be good and happy to-day.”

Our business is to be good and happy.  This dogma inevitably suggests the question—­What was Sydney Smith’s religion?  First and foremost, he was a staunch and consistent Theist.—­

“I hate the insolence, persecution, and intolerance, which so often pass under the name of religion, and have fought against them; but I have an unaffected horror of irreligion and impiety, and every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel."[174]

In a lighter vein, he talked with dread of travelling in a stage-coach with “an Atheist who told me what he had said in his heart."[175] And in 1808 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey with reference to the tone of the Edinburgh Review:—­

“I must beg the favour of you to be explicit on one point.  Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess or encourage infidel principles?  Unless this is the case, I must absolutely give up all thoughts of connecting myself with it.”

The grounds on which his theism rested seem, as Sir Leslie Stephen points out, to have been exactly those which satisfied Paley.  Lord Murray, who, though he was a judge, does not seem to have been exacting about the quality of argument, admiringly relates this anecdote of his friend:—­

“A foreigner, on one occasion, indulging in sceptical doubts of the existence of an overruling Providence in his presence, Sydney, who had observed him evidently well satisfied with his repast, said, ’You must admit there is great genius and thought in that dish.’  ‘Admirable!’ he replied; ‘nothing can be better,’ ’May I then ask, are you prepared to deny the existence of the cook?”

Of course this is nothing but Paley’s illustration of the Watch, reproduced in a less impressive form.