69
“STRIKING EVIDENCES OF THE DIVINITY OF THE SCRIPTURES. I. EXAMPLES OF DYING INFIDELS,” The Moral and Religious Cabinet, vol. 1 (26 March 1808), pp. 193–8; selection pp. 196–7.
Anonymous
The Moral and Religious Cabinet was published and printed by John C. Totten in New York. The weekly’s emphasis was Methodist. See Gaylord P. Albaugh, History and Annotated Bibliography of American Religious Periodicals and Newspapers (Worcester, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 639–40; API, p. 147.
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The last days of David Hume, that celebrated deist, were spent in playing at whist, in cracking his jokes about Charon and his boat, and in reading Lucian and other entertaining books. — This is a consummatum est worthy of a clever fellow, whose conscience was seared as with a hot iron! Dr. Johnson observes on this impenitent death-bed scene — “Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man who had been at no pains to enquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death should alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right. He had a vanity in being though easy.” Dives fared sumptuously every day, and saw no danger: but, the next thing we hear of him is — In hell be lifted up his eyes, being in torments!