SLACK
SMITH
service in securing lectures and music on
Sundays. D. June 16, 1896.
SLACK, Professor Samuel Benjamin,
M.A., philologist. B. Dec. 26, 1859. Ed. Liverpool College and Oxford (Balliol). Slack was Classical Scholar, Prosser Exhi bitioner, first class in Classical Moderations, and honourably mentioned for the Craven Scholarship. From 1884 to 1890 he was second master of the Sheffield Grammar School ; and from 1893 to 1895 assistant master at the Oxford Military College. Since 1896 he has been professor of classics and lecturer on comparative philology at McGill University, Montreal. For the E. P. A., Professor Slack translated Dr. van den Bergh van Eysinga s Radical Views about the New Testament (1912), with an introduction in which he expresses his own Eationalism.
SLATER, Thomas, lecturer. B. Sep. 15, 1820. Slater lost his father in early child hood, and was educated by his mother as a Wesleyan Methodist. He joined the Chartists and early Co-operators, and was thus led into contact with Holyoake and his followers. His orthodoxy was left behind about 1850, and he was a familiar figure in the Secularist movement until his death. He was also an apostle of Co operation, and was for a time on the Bury Town Council. In his later years he had charge of the Secularist Bookstore at Leicester. D. 1900.
SMETANA, Professor Augustin, Bohe mian philosopher. B. 1814. Smetana was a Catholic professor of philosophy at Prague University, who accepted the ideas of Hegel, and was expelled from his chair. He there upon abandoned the Catholic Church and became a prominent Eationalist (1850). His views are given in his Der Geist, sein Entstehenund Vergehen(l865) and his auto biographical Geschichte eines Excommuni- cierten (1863). He was formally excommu nicated by the Church. See Studemund s Dermoderne Unglaube (1900). D. 1871.
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SMITH, Adam, F.E.S., economist. B.
June 5, 1723. Ed. Kirkcaldy Burgh School,
Glasgow University, and Oxford (Balliol).
Smith went to Oxford in virtue of an
exhibition which he won at Glasgow Uni
versity, of which one condition was that
he was to become a minister of the
Church of Scotland. He evaded this as,
his biographer says, " he did not find the-
ecclesiastical profession suitable to his-
taste." He had, in fact, already accepted
the philosophy of Hume ; and he was-
severely reprimanded at Oxford for reading
Hume. He took up lecturing in Kirk
caldy, and his success was such that in
1751 he was called to the chair of logic at
Glasgow University. In the following year
he passed to the chair of moral philosophy ;
from 1760 to 1762 he was dean of the
faculty ; and in 1762 he became Vice-
Eector. Most of his students were preparing
for the Church, so that Smith had to be
careful ; but his intimate friendship with
Hume, Watt, and Lord Kames sufficiently
betrayed his Eationalism. In 1759 he
published his Theory of the Moral Sentiment,
From 1764 to 1767 he acted as tutor to-
the young Duke of Buccleuch ; and at-
Paris, where they lived for a time, he
entered into cordial relations with Voltaire,
Eousseau, and the Encyclopaedists. He
was admitted to the Eoyal Society in 1767.
Eetiring to Kirkcaldy, he wrote his famous
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (2 vols., 1776), an
epoch-making work, which was translated
into nearly every European language. In
the following year he published his Life of
Hume, in which he so plainly endorses
Hume s opinions that the Bishopof Norwich
and others violently denounced the book as
anti-Christian. He was appointed Com
missioner of Customs in 1777, and was
Lord Eector of Glasgow University in
1787. Smith was so anxious about his
position, as he said, that he declined to
take charge of the publication of Hume s
Dialogues on Natural Religion, and shortly
before his death he had sixteen volumes
of his manuscripts burned. But there is no
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