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“HUME’S INFIDELITY,” Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal, vol. 15, no. 31 (31 July 1844), [p. 121].
[Francis Palgrave]
This assessment of Hume was excerpted from Sir Francis Palgrave’s (1788–1861) influential essay, “Hume and his Influence upon History,” first published in the Quarterly Review, vol. 73 (March 1844), pp. 536–92. The Zion’s Herald was published in Boston from 1823. It was one of the most successful Methodists magazines in nineteenth-century America and was published through to the twentieth century. The passages of Palgrave reprinted here were also reprinted in other American magazines, such as the Eclectic Magazine in July 1844 and the Christian Secretary in October 1844. We see that Hume’s reputation as historian was falling with some — just as his reputation as philosopher was beginning to ascend with others.
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HUME’S INFIDELITY.
“But all his powers — they were great, and might have been noble — are rendered useless by the consummate Rhetor’s continued perversion of history into a panegyric of infidelity. His metaphysical writings have always been more known than read — so dull, that even the zest of doing a wrong thing can hardly now persuade a reader to grapple with their drowsy inanity. Even the warmth and talents of his opponents could never criticize them into popularity. At last he discovered his peculiar talent. It was this acquisition of self-knowledge, and not the opportunities of his office, which induced him, like Voltaire, to adopt history as the more effective vehicle of his opinions; and he fully succeeded. “INFIDELITY FOR THE MILLION’ is the heading for HUME’S history, than which only one other — and is it needful to name Gibbon? — has exerted a more baneful influence upon English literature, and through English literature upon the civilized world.
Antipathy to faith had become engrafted upon his moral constitution. Like Gibbon he was possessed with malignant hatred against all goodness and holiness. ‘Never lose an opportunity,’ was the advice given by a kindred spirit, ‘of placing gunpowder, grain by grain, under the gigantic head of superstition, until the mine shall be charged with a sufficient quantity to blow up the whole.’ Hume did not dare to fire the train. He would have dreaded the smoke and noise of an explosion. Adopting the coarse but forcible expression suggested by a crime unknown in the ‘dark ages,’ and generated in the full blaze of civilization, he always tried to burke religion. Temper, as well as prudence, had from the first beginning rendered him sober. Personal considerations had due influence: he courted not the honors of martyrdom. Opinion imposed some check; law more. In England there was a boundary which could not he quite safely passed. Some examples had occurred sufficient to warn him. Like Asgill or Toland or Woolston or Peter Annet he might be seduced beyond the bounds of conventional impunity, granted to free thinking, and find himself in the presentment of the grand jury, with a prospect of Newgate and the pillory in the background; far enough off, yet disagreeable objects, looming in the horizon. At Edinburgh an ecclesiastical prosecution brushed by him. ‘An overture’ was made in the General Assembly for appointing a committee to call the philosopher before the synod as the author of books ‘containing the most rude and open attacks upon the Gospel; and principles evidently subversive even of natural religion and the foundations of morality, if not establishing direct atheism.’
To this one object, the destruction of ‘religious fiction and chimeras,’ all Hume’s endeavors were directed. It was the one end and intent of the History which gives to the whole the epic unity whence its seductive merit is in a great measure derived. Hume’s mode of dealing with religion shows the cowardice of his heart: he dreaded lest conviction should come upon him against his will. He was constantly trying to stupify his own conscience lest the pain of perceiving any reality in things unseen should come on. The first object of Hume is to nullify religion. All the workings of Providence in worldly affairs are denied; or blurred, when he cannot deny them. All active operation of holiness, all sincerity, is excluded. He constantly labors to suppress any belief in belief as an efficient cause of action: he will rather infer any other influential motive.
Silence, argumentation, equivocation, absolute falsity, are all employed with equal dexterity, and in sovereign contempt of all the laws by which the conscience of an historian should be ruled. But if he cannot blot out religion entirely he lowers, degrades, deforms it; yet he prefers to affect contempt rather than express absolute aversion; he treats faith rather as a meanness, which the enlightened philosopher is ashamed to notice, than as an enemy who needs to be actively expelled. Ever and anon, however, his hatred becomes apparent; and he forgets even the conventional decencies of language in the bitterness of his heart.
When his so called History is not an inferential argument against religion it is an invective. Could the powers of Belial he described more forcibly than in the following remarkable passage?* ‘Hume, without positively asserting much more than he can prove, gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case. He glides lightly over those which are unfavorable to it. His own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Every thing that is offered on the other side is scrutinized with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated or passed by without notice. Concessions even are sometimes made; but this insiduous candor only increases the effect of this vast mass of sophistry.’ And in every shape Hume is the Belial advocate of infidelity.” — Eclectic Magazine for July.
*From Mr. Macaulay’s article upon “History,” Edinburgh Review, No. xciv., p. 359. We have no hesitation in affixing Mr. Macaulay’s name to this admirable and in most respects incontrovertible essay. Since he has not reprinted it in his collection we trust he will reproduce it in an enlarged form, perhaps reconsidering his judgment of the Greek historians.