The University of Oxford was at that time and for the rest of the century sunk deep in intellectual apathy, a muddy reservoir of sloth, ignorance, and luxury from which men sank as by a law of gravitation into the still lower level of civil and ecclesiastical sinecures. In the colleges there were only degrees of badness; but the charity of Snell had been rather unkind to Smith, for Balliol being Jacobite was particularly rowdy and intolerant. It has been mentioned that in his last year at Glasgow, Smith wrote for Hutcheson an abstract of David Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_ which brought him a presentation copy from the author. This copy he seems to have carried south with him; for the Balliol authorities, it is recorded, caught Smith in the act of reading the godless work, censured him severely, and confiscated a book which more than a century afterwards was to be sumptuously edited by two honoured alumni of the same college. The narrow spirit which this incident illustrates seems to have made a painful impression upon the student’s memory. In the _Wealth of Nations_ he complains bitterly of the compulsory “sham-lecture,” and visits with severe censure the casuistry and sophistry by which the ancient course of philosophy had been corrupted. This completed course, he says, was meant to train ecclesiastics, and “certainly did not render it more proper for the education of gentlemen or men of the world, or more likely either to improve the understanding or to mend the heart.” At Oxford “the greater part of the public professors have for many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.” College discipline was in general contrived “not for the benefit of the students, but for the interests, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.”