Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher who taught logic and moral philosophy at Glasgow before publishing The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776), the book that made him the founding figure of modern economics. He is remembered for the invisible hand and the division of labour, but The Wealth of Nations is a sprawling work of moral and political philosophy whose fifth and final book turns to the duties of the state — defence, justice, public works, and, in the passage that produced this line, religious instruction. Smith wrote as an Enlightenment critic of factional religious zeal, in close intellectual company with his friend David Hume, whom he quotes at length just pages before this sentence.