An established church may have a superiority of learning, but in the art of gaining popularity the advantage is always with its adversaries. He finds that, as dissenting bodies grow richer, their zeal and activity abate. The Independents, for instance, had many learned, ingenious, and respectable men; but the Methodists, without half the learning of the Dissenters, were more in vogue. The strength of the Church of Rome he attributed to the fact that the industry of its inferior clergy was better fostered by motives of self-interest than in the case of any established Protestant church; for many of the parish priests subsisted largely on voluntary gifts, “a source of revenue which confession gives them many opportunities of improving.” He notes also Machiavelli’s observation, that the establishment of the begging orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis revived, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the languishing faith and devotion of the Catholic Church. Upon the question of the value of a State Church, Smith quotes from a certain passage of Hume’s History, referring to his friend as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.” Hume had come to the conclusion that the civil magistrate who neglects to establish a religion will find he has dearly paid for his frugality, “and that in reality the most decent and advantageous composition which he can make with the spiritual guides, is to bribe their indolence by assigning stated salaries to their profession,” so that ecclesiastical establishments, “though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society.”

But Smith, with the same dislike for “zeal,” had too much respect for liberty, too much love of honesty in politics, to adopt Hume’s cynical solution. He would find security in numbers. A State should extend toleration to all; society would naturally divide itself into hundreds of small sects, none of which could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquillity. The teachers of each sect would be forced to learn a candour and moderation which is seldom to be found among an established clergy; and in this way, by mutual concessions, their doctrine would probably be reduced in time “to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established, but such as positive law has perhaps never yet established in any country.” This plan of ecclesiastical government, he adds, or more properly no ecclesiastical government, was what the Independents, “a sect no doubt of very wild enthusiasts,” proposed to establish in England towards the end of the Civil War. “If it had been established, though of a very unphilosophical origin, it would probably by this time have been productive of the most philosophical good temper and moderation with regard to every sort of religious principle.” Such is the plan favoured by Adam Smith, and he observes that in Pennsylvania, where it had been adopted, experience justified his opinion.

Smith was so popular with his orthodox contemporaries that they tried to parry charges of infidelity by saying either that he had adopted Hume’s opinions out of the intense affection he felt for him, or that he had been perverted by French atheists. “In the course of his travels,” says one of the most broad-minded of his Presbyterian contemporaries (John Ramsay), “he became acquainted with Voltaire and the other French philosophers who were then labouring with unhallowed industry in the vineyard of infidelity.” What impression they made upon him, adds this cautious man, “cannot be precisely known, because neither before nor after this period was his religious creed ever properly ascertained.”

Twenty years after Adam Smith’s death, Archbishop Magee, in a controversy with Unitarian theologians, cited a passage from the Moral Sentiments on the doctrine of atonement, in which Smith had said that the doctrines of revelation coincide in every respect with the original anticipations of nature. “Such,” wrote the divine, “are the reflections of a man whose powers of thinking and reasoning will surely not be pronounced inferior to those of any even of the most distinguished champions of the Unitarian school.” The rejoinder was at once made that in the sixth edition, which Smith prepared for the press in 1790, the passage was omitted; whereupon the prelate (forgetting that Hume died in 1776, after four editions had appeared with this presentation of the reasonableness of an atonement) deftly turned a new moral: “It adds one proof more to the many that already existed of the danger, even to the most enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity.”

CHAPTER IV
THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

In 1759, the seventh year of his professorship, Smith completed the first of his two capital achievements. His scholiasts are still curiously hazy about its early editions, partly perhaps because neither the first, second, nor third is to be found in the library of the British Museum. The first edition is a single octavo volume of 551 pages, printed in good large type.[10] The title-page runs as follows:—

THE
THEORY
OF
MORAL SENTIMENTS

by Adam Smith

Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Glasgow.

London:
Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand
and A. Kincaid and J. Bell in Edinburgh.
MDCCLIX.