The old cry ‘The Church in Danger’ became ‘England in Danger’ early in the new century. While the anti-fanatic pamphlets, articles, reviews, letters, clerical lectures and bishops' or archdeacons' charges came out, in large numbers, with new attacks on the Bible, Religious Tract, Church Missionary and Vice Societies, on the prostitution and penitential societies, on the abolition of slavery, the missionaries and the prodigious Evangelical activity for benighted foreigners, a compounded case against the Evangelicals was repeatedly stated by the Reverend Sydney Smith, whose request to Wilberforce in 1807 to take up the cause of the oppressed Irish now he had done with the Negroes showed such an ingenuous misunderstanding of the Evangelical purpose. Smith perhaps stood for the utmost opposition to the truly religious character that an intelligent and virtuous clergyman could attain. A liberal and hater of injustice, pedantry and humbug, after Paley's death in 1805 he was possibly the best exponent in England of a religion of good-hearted common sense in which the ‘peculiar doctrines’ of Christianity were wholly wanting. He was one of the great English wits, very skilful in exposing ludicrous pretentiousness or falsity and, with some shallowness and smugness, on the side of the angels if they are non-Evangelical angels. His four articles in the Edinburgh Review in 1808 and 1809 were widely read and considered damaging.