RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Smith
was tutor there, 1770-73; first president of Hampden Sidney College, 1775; became professor of moral philosophy at Princeton College in 1779; and was president, 1794-1812. In 1786 he was a member of the committee which drew up the Form of Government of the Presbyterian Church. He had a high reputation as a pulpit orator and college president. He published Sermons (Newark, N. J., 1799); Lectures on the Evidences of the Christian Religion, (Philadelphia, 1809) ; Lectures on Moral and Political Philosophy (Trenton, N. J., 1812); Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (New Brunswick, N. J., 1815); (posthumous) Sermons, with Memoir (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1821). Bibliography: W. B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, iii. 335-345, New York, 1858; I. W. Riley, American Philosophy; the early Schools, pp. 497-509, ib. 1907.
SMITH, SYDNEY: Church of England; b. at Woodford (7 m. n.e. of Charing Cross), London, June 3, 1771; d. in London Feb. 22, 1845. He was graduated from Oxford, 1792; took holy orders, 1794; was minister of Charlotte Episcopal chapel, Edinburgh, 1797-1802; canon of Bristol, 1828; and canon residentiary of St. Paul's, 1831. He was one of the most famous of English wits; but he was also a forcible, earnest preacher, and a sagacious critic and reviewer. He was the real founder of The Edinburgh Review (1802 sqq.) and wrote for it some eighty articles which are among the best that appeared during the first twenty-five years of its publication. Besides his Sermons (2 vols., London, 1809) he published Peter Plumley's Letters, and Selected Essays (1886), which did much to promote Roman Catholic emancipation; Sermons Preached at St. Paul's Cathedral, The Foundling Hospital, and Several Churches in London, together with Others Addressed to a Country Congregation (1846); Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1850); and in 1848 appeared the fourth edition of his works in 3 vols.
Bibliography: Lady Holland (his daughter), A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith. With a Selection from his Letters, ed. Mrs. Austin, London, 1855; S. J. Keid, Sketch of the Life and Times of . Sydney Smith, ib. 1884; A. Chevrillon, Sydney Smith et la renaissance des idees liberates en Angleterre au xix. siecle, Paris, 1894; DNB, liii. 119-123.
SMITH, THOMAS: Free Church of Scotland; b. at Symington (31 m. s.e. of Glasgow), Lanarkshire, July 8, 1817; d. at Edinburgh May 23, 1906. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and in 1839 was ordained a missionary to Calcutta. Until 1858 he was engaged chiefly in teaching in the General Assembly's Institution and after 1843, when he joined the Free Church, in the institute of the latter denomination. He was long an associate editor of the Calcutta Christian Observer, and for ten years edited the Calcutta Review. For a short time during the Mutiny he was chaplain of the Black Watch, and it is especially noteworthy that he was the first to organize the system of zenana missions in India. In 1858 he returned to Scotland; was minister of Cowgatehead Free Church, Edinburgh (1859-80); and professor of evangelistic theology in New College, Edinburgh (1880-93). He wrote Mediaeval Missions (Edinburgh, 1880); Anselm of Canterbury (1882); Alexander Duff (London, 1883); Memoirs of James Begg (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1885-88) ; and Euclid, his Life and System (1902); translated the
Clementine Recognitions for the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Edinburgh, 1867) and G. Warneck's Modern Missions and Culture (1883); and edited the letters of S. Rutherford (1881).
SMITH, WILLIAM ANDREW: Methodist Episcopal, South; b. at Fredericksburg, Va., Nov. 29, 1802; d. at Richmond, Va., Mar. 1, 1870. He professed religion at seventeen years of age, prepared for the ministry, and was admitted into the Virginia Conference in 1825. In 1833 he was appointed agent for Randolph-Macon College, then in its infancy. He then filled many of the most important stations in his conference until 1846, when he was called to the presidency of Randolph-Macon College. This position, as well as that of professor of mental and moral philosophy, he filled with great acceptability and efficiency until 1866, when he moved to St. Louis, Mo. After serving here as pastor of Centenary Church for two years, he became president of Central College, located at Fayette in that state. At the eventful general conference of 1844 he took a specially prominent part; and in the celebrated appeal of Rev. Francis A. Harding, and in the extra-judicial trial of Bishop James Osgood Andrew, he won a national reputation for deliberative and forensic eloquence and for rare powers of argument and debate. He was a hard student and an earnest thinker. The vigor and clearness of his intellect, his candor, independence, energy, and unquestioned ability, caused him to stand in the front rank of the leading minds in the Methodist- Episcopal Church, South. His Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (Nashville, 1857) attracted wide attention as one of the ablest presentations of the southern side of the slavery question ever published. Bibliography: A biographical sketch by Bishop J. C.
Granbery is embodied in the Minutes of the denomination
for 1870.
SMITH, WILLIAM ROBERTSON: English critical theologian and Semitic scholar; b. at New Farm, near Keig (22 m. n.w. of Aberdeen), Aberdeenshire, Nov. 8, 1846; d. at Cambridge Mar. 31, 1894. He was educated by his father and at Aberdeen University (1861-65), New College (the Life. Free Church theological hall), Edinburgh (1866-70), and the universities of Bonn and Gottingen (summers of 1867 and 1869), while in 1868-70 he was also assistant to the professor of natural philosophy in Edinburgh University. In 1870 he was appointed professor of oriental languages and Old-Testament exegesis in the Free Church College at Aberdeen, and five years later he became a member of the Old-Testament revision company. It was during this period that a crisis occurred in Smith's career when he was invited to prepare articles on Old-Testament criticism for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The very first articles (" Angel " and " Bible ") aroused a storm of protest, and on the unfavorable report of an investigating committee, in 1877, Smith demanded formal trial. His activity as a teacher practically ended in the following year; his entire series of articles for the encyclopedia were held to impair belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures; and in 1881 he was suspended from his professorship. He had meanwhile delivered at Edinburgh and Glasgow
Smith Snethen