73
“Adversaria: ‘Hume and Finley’,” The Ordeal (11 February 1809), p. 94.
Anonymous
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Hume and Finley
ARE names oddly coupled; yet the closing circumstances of their lives strongly invited the contrast. If the Ordeal has exposed the lame logick of the Christian’s Magazine, the candid reader of the whole account will, however, see the point of the writer. A portion of honour was impliedly conceded to the skeptick for his calmness, or his death would not have been opposed to that of the Christian: yet that this little honour should finally be wrested from him by Dr. Mason was hardly fair. To me, a plain-spoken Christian, incapable of drawing such fine pictures as Dr. Mason, and fearing to treat the subject of religion with flippancy, the path of propriety seems to lie between the conduct of the two celebrated men. No Christian would wish for the skepticism of Hume; none dares thus trifle with futurity: and every rational Christian cannot help being somewhat disgusted with the vanity and extravagance of Dr. Finley. In the death of this man, we hear almost the ravings of fanaticism; in that of the deist, the sullen, cheerless monotony of the stoick. Dr. Mason says ‘no infidel dies a triumphant death.’ Infidelity loses nothing by this fact. Extatick feelings and expressions suit not with the sober sadness of a dying hour: there is nothing in them of natural reason, or religion. The death of Jesus Christ, showed as much of honour as of consolation. Hume affected to contemn death; Finley to triumph over it: the humble Christian does neither. The exit of the first, betrays the pride of a philosopher; of the last, the pride of a saint: an enemy of all pride whatever, I would wish living and dying to cherish the temper of unostentatious penitence. Nevertheless I would rather emulate the assurance of Samuel Finley, than be frozen with the rigours of David Hume. Most of all would I desire to die like my master, who had no will but God’s, and who, expiring, said, ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.’