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“REMARKS ON HUME’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND,” Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4 (April 1818), pp. 159–64.
“C.”
The Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine was published out of Richmond, Virginia, for the decade from 1818 to 1828. Published by N. Pollard, its long-time editor was the Rev. John Holt Rice (1777–1831), who is referred to in a footnote in the “Remarks” reprinted below. Rice, who would become the First Professor of Christian Theology in the Union Theological Seminary (originally Hampden-Sydney College), had been influenced heavily by the Rev. Archibald Alexander (1772–1851). On Alexander, see selection #23. On Rice see Ernest Trice Thompson’s entry in DAB (vol. 8, part 1, pp. 541–2); and for his thoughts on education compared with another American who came to think Hume dangerous, see David E. Swift, “Thomas Jefferson, John Holt Rice, and Education in Virginia, 1818–25,” Journal of Presbyterian History, vol. 49, no. 1 (Spring 1971), pp. 32–58. It is not known who “C.” was, but his Jeffersonian Age essay is interesting, not least for its perspective on the English and French Revolutions.
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For the Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine.
REMARKS ON HUME’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Few books are more generally read by people of education in the United States than Hume’s history of England. Hume was possessed of such distinguished talents, has so much historical merit, and occupies such an important field in that department of literature, that he bids fair to be long a standard book in our language; and yet, he is the subject of some important defects, against which his readers cannot be too faithfully cautioned. — There are two things in particular, which make Hume’s history of England dangerous to the American reader; he is an enemy to republican liberty, and an enemy to religion. Considering that Mr. Hume is a philosopher, he generally treats the superstitions of popery with great forbearance and even complaisance. For freethinkers, whenever he meets with them, he makes the best apologies in his power. But against the puritans and other disciples of the Genevan School, he lets loose all the venom of his pen. His attacks on this class of christians, is characterized by a degree of insidiousness and artifice unworthy of a man of talents. He often misrepresents their motives; he holds them up to ridicule by detailing their queer and uncouth expressions, and in order to excite a general odium, he frequently sets down the crimes of a few individuals to the account of the whole fraternity. When he deals with prominent characters, he exhibits their faults with the whole force of his eloquence, whilst their virtues are either passed in silence, or deformed by detraction. This mode of writing, is very unfavorable to truth; it prevents our discovering what the disciples of Geneva have done for producing the present state of things, both in Britain and America; but Mr. Hume passed it off with the more plausibility, as his calumnies were supported by the whole weight of court influence, during the reign of the Stuarts; a length of time sufficient to give them something like the authority of prescription.
But one of the most unmanageable characters with whom Hume seems to have met, was the celebrated John Knox. All our respect for the talents of this historian, could hardly keep us from being diverted with his complaint in behalf of Mary Queen of Scots, against this apostle of the reformation in Scotland. John Knox it seems, was rather an unpolished man. He felt but little respect for the errors and vices of a royal personage. He was a man of uncourteous phrase, and when admitted to the drawing room of such a princess as Mary, was rather an ungracious inmate. Now to understand all this the better, let us enquire a little who was Mary queen of Scots? and who was John Knox? Mary was no doubt in many respects, a most accomplished and fascinating princess. She had however, been educated in the court of France; the great seat of refinement, gallantry and pleasure — in other words, in the most profligate and voluptuous court in Europe, when the superstitions and indulgencies of popery, operated as a hot bed to fructify the vices, and to annihilate all the principles of morality and religion. — Whatever apology Mary may derive from her situation, her subsequent conduct shews that she had drunk too deeply of that cup of pleasure which was poisoning the French metropolis. She was, however, a zealous devotee of the Roman Catholic church. She had her masses, crucifixes, and confessors in abundance. But under this mask of religion, she had her swarms of fiddlers and dancers, and all the apparatus of fashionable dissipation and corruption with which the French capital abounded. John Knox, on the other hand, was warm from the feet of Calvin, burning with the zeal and animated with the courage of an apostle. He had long witnessed and lamented the abuses and usurpations of popery; he had seen the piety and morality of the gospel buried under a cloud of unmeaning rites, or converted into a lucrative traffic by the Papal See. To reform these abuses, and to give to his country the christian religion in its purity, was the object of his life; and an object for the accomplishment of which he would have held his life as a cheap sacrifice. Between such a princess and such a reformer, what common sentiment could exist? What amicable conference could they hold, or who could expect that their altercations should be free from severity? But had this intrepid minister of Christ changed his conduct; had he become the smooth-tongued courtier, or the cringing sycophant, in the presence of his queen; with what indignant sarcasm would the eloquent historian have trampled on his pusillanimity instead of reviling his audacity — But let it be remembered that, under the divine blessing, Knox succeeded in his momentous enterprise. Without the advantages of wealth or high birth, aided by his eloquence, and relying on the goodness of his cause, he stemmed the torrent of opposition, and became the honored instrument of heaven in completing the reformation in Scotland. This reformation has been the principal cause of raising Scotland to that distinguished eminence of morals, science, and felicity, which she at present occupies; and Hume himself is indebted to Knox for that light of science, which developed his powers, and gave him his high standing as the historian of his country. One well attested fact strongly illustrates the importance of the Scots reformation.
Previous to that event, the lower orders in Scotland were perhaps more profligate than those of England; since that time, the number of her criminals, in proportion to her population, are but as one to twelve to those of England; and even England is improving in this respect since her reformation. This change, so far as human means are considered, must be ascribed to the labors of John Knox; a degree of merit which might induce his countrymen to forgive his uncourteous manners, if they could not approve them; and which the historian of that day ought to have mentioned in connexion with the many faults he has though proper to affix to his name.
Let us next enquire, to what merit the Puritans are generally entitled. Coming from the school of Calvin, and from the nature of their ecclesiastical government, they were essentially republican.* They had not carried out their ideas of religious liberty to the extent so happily exemplified at present in this country, but they certainly laid the foundation of the superstructure which has since been completed in the United States. Mr. Hume acknowledges that during the latter years of Elizabeth, when the royal prerogative was raised to the most formidable height, these Puritans were the only people who kept alive any thing like the spirit of liberty. At a subsequent period they shook the throne of the Stuarts, and kindled that flame of liberty which ultimately expelled that domineering and arbitrary family. To these people we are indebted for the English revolution, which perfected that system of jurisprudence from which we have borrowed so largely, and which gave to the representative principle that consideration and improvement which prepared it for becoming the foundation of all our civil institutions. That such a people should be calumniated in Britain, where their experiments were less successful, was more to be expected; but we trust that the U. States, which has enjoyed the full harvest of their labors and sufferings, will know better how to appreciated their services. These are the people, however, whom Mr. Hume wished to overwhelm with contempt, and to banish from his country; and in their place he would have filled that country with philosophers from his own school. Not with scientific philosophers; but with such as France abounded in, from the cobbler’s stall up to the princely hotel, previous to her revolution. How much he would have benefitted mankind by such a change, may be determined by comparing and contrasting the principal features in the English revolution, in the time of Charles the First, conducted by the disciples of Calvin, and the French revolution, conducted by the disciples of Hume and Voltaire. This comparison, if pursued into its details, might be very instructive, as it would exhibit men of different religious impressions, acting in scenes, which awakened all the passions of the human mind, and afford an opportunity of remarking the result. On this subject, however, we shall attempt but a few observations.
Between the two revolutions just mentions, there are many strong points of resemblance. Each of those revolutions, in its turn, filled Europe with consternation. Each of them occasioned the death of a Monarch; made abortive efforts to establish a republic; sunk into military despotism; and ultimately rendered back the respective nations to the regal sceptres of those families so ignominiously expelled. So far the representation is complete; but the points of dissimilarity are no less obvious and striking. The force of the English revolution was directed against Charles the First. This Monarch had labored for years to establish absolute authority, and destroy the liberties of his people; when resisted, he waged a long and bloody war against his subjects; and when finally overcome, he was seized and led to the scaffold by the faction of a usurper, contract to the wishes of the nation. — Lewis the Sixteenth met the discontents of his people in the spirit of concession. He summoned the wisdom of the nation to devise expedients for lightening the burdens of the state. He consented to change the absolute government of France into a constitution comprising as much liberty as the name of monarchy would admit. This conduct might have disarmed resentment, and yet his execution was singularly cruel. Not to mention other indignities, when on the scaffold and about to exercise a privilege granted from time immemorial, to the worst of criminals — that of addressing the spectators; his voice was suddenly drowned by the thunder of drums and artillery, and the order given for his immediate decapitation. During the civil commotions of England, many of the nobility and gentry espoused neither party; they retired to their estates, and quietly waited the issue of the contest without molestation. In France the utmost ingenuity of tergiversation was often insufficient for the preservation of life. Power was every day shifting from faction to faction. Those who did not satisfy the present rulers by the warmest professions of loyalty and civism, incurred their suspicion; and those who did, incurred the resentment of their successors. In England, as has been common in all similar revolutions, the republican party continued united until the common danger was dissipated. When the revolutionary war was terminated, then, indeed, factions arose, and a scramble for power commenced, which defeated the object of the revolution itself. In France, so violent were the principles of discord, and so unfit the actors for any form of government, that whilst the most formidable armies in Europe were hovering on the frontiers, the factious in Paris were drilling the mobs, and waging incessant wars against one another. The machinations of ambition knew no pause. These men were able to falsify the old maxim, “that a powerful enemy could unite all whom he threatened.” The crown was no sooner hurled from the head of Lewis, than every demagogue seemed to view it as a prize at which he might aim, but to which he must wade through the blood of his competitors. And hence the French revolution was from first to last, a sea of blood, which seems to stand without a parallel in the annals of human nature. In England, proscriptions and executions were not frequent, and were generally confined to characters of rank and influence. In France, the rage of faction was let loose on the lowest of the people, and produced the most extensive scenes of indiscriminate and wanton slaughter. Such are the outlines of the difference between two great revolutions, the one conducted, by what some have termed religious enthusiasts; the other, by atheists. That the French revolution failed in the establishment of republicanism, may be variously accounted for; but its sanguinary excesses can be ascribed to nothing but the infidelity of the times. In this respect, it has left the world an awful lesson, and no people are more interested in reading that lesson aright, than the people of the United States.
C.
*See this truth judiciously enforced in a pamphlet by the Rev. John H. Rice, of Richmond, which we hope to see generally circulated.