454 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [1803 



in any part of this mode of acquiring wealth. Nevertheless, it did 

 tend to entangle him with the affairs of this life, and did tend to 

 prevent his applying himself wholly to that one great duty which 

 lies upon the bishop as well as upon the priest, and to his " draw- 

 ing all his cares and studies in that way." 



It was doubtless to these tastes or pursuits of Dr. Smith that 

 Bishop White refers when, speaking of him, he says : 



His talents are in no need of my recommendation, and had they been 

 devoted to literature, and not too much devoted to politics and specu- 

 lations in land, there is no knowing the measure of celebrity which 

 mi.t^ht be thoufrht too great to be attained. 



5. All the reasons which I have enumerated why Dr. Smith was 

 not the best person for a bishop in a new, impoverished and highly 

 republican diocese, without doubt existed, and they were all good 

 reasons why he should not have been consecrated, though no one 

 of them fixed upon him the stain of immorality. A graver one 

 has been made. It is not exactly that he was "given to wine" — 

 sucJl a charge, in view of the strong attestations of good character 

 from his diocese and parish, the best witnesses of his daily life, 

 would have borne falsehood on its face — but that his habits being, 

 in accordance with those of most gentlemen in his day, somewhat 

 social, he was on one occasion, in the year 1785, so far overtaken 

 as to have transcended the limits allowable to the clergy. He 

 himself, we know, denied the charge and invited proof of it ; no 

 proof that was legal proof — by which I mean that a court of jus- 

 tice would have listened to — was ever, that I know of, given. 

 That nothing like habitual impropriety in this way was ever in- 

 dulged, or ever supposed to be, is shown, I think, conclusively, not 

 only by the attestations of this diocese and parish, above referred 

 to, but by the numberless appointments of honor and confidence 

 with which, after this time, he was invested up to his very dying 

 hours; the president of every house of clerical and lay deputies, 

 from the time of the constitution of such a chamber till his physical 

 infirmities rendered him incapable of presiding anywhere at all ; 

 the successively selected preacher year after year of all the church 

 at the consecration of her first three bishops consecrated in 

 America;* appointed on almost every important committee con- 

 stituted by the church conventions in his time, and usually their 



* Clagget, Bass and Smith. 



