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How very clearly we find these principles practically illustrated in his History! A disinclination to believe in the narratives of great and remarkable deeds proceeding from peculiar impulses: a propensity, when the evidence adduced in their favour cannot be rebutted, to treat these peculiarities rather as diseases of the mind, than as the operation of noble aspirations: a levelling disposition to find all men pretty much upon a par, and none in a marked manner better or worse than their neighbours: an inclination to doubt all [279]authorities which tended to prove that the British people had any fundamental liberties not possessed by the French and other European nations. Such are the practical fruits of this necessitarian philosophy.

It was on this occasion that Hume promulgated those opinions upon miracles, which we have found him afraid to make public even in that work of which he afterwards regretted the bold and rash character. No part of his writings gave more offence to serious and devout thinkers; but the offence was in the manner of the promulgation, not the matter of the opinions. To understand how this occurred, let us cast a glance for a moment at two opposite classes of religious thinkers, into which a large portion of the Christian world is divided, and find with which, if with either, Hume's opinions coincide.

If we suppose a man, impressed with a feeling of devotion and reverence for a Superior Being, who, seeing in the order of the world and all its movements, the omnipotent, all-wise, and all-merciful guidance of a divine Providence, believes that the Great Being will give to his creatures no revelation that is not in accordance with the merciful harmony of all his ways; and thus devoutly and submissively receives the word of God as promulgated in the Bible; attempts to make it the rule of his actions and opinions; receives with deference the views of those whom the same power that authorized it, has permitted to be the human instruments of its promulgation and explanation; tries to understand what it is within the power of his limited faculties to comprehend; but, implicitly believing that in the shadows of those mysteries which he is unable to penetrate, there lie operations as completely part of one great regular plan, as merciful, as beneficent, and as wise as the outward and comprehensible acts of [280]Providence; who thus never for one moment allows his mind to doubt, where it is unable to comprehend or explain—such a man finds none of his sentiments in the writings of Hume, for he is at once told there that reason and revelation are two disconnected things, that each must act alone, and that the one derives no aid from the other.

But take one who believes that religion is too sacred to be in any way allied with so poor and miserable a thing as erring human reason; who feels that it is not in himself to merit any of the boundless mercies of the atonement; and that to endeavour by his actions, or the direction of his thoughts, to be made a participator in them, is but setting blind reason to lead the blind appetites and desires; who feels that by no act of his own, the true light of the Christian religion has been lighted within him as by a miracle; who has been adopted by a sudden change in his spiritual nature into the family of the faithful—then there is nothing in all Hume's philosophy to militate against the religion of such a man, but rather many arguments in its favour, both implied and expressed.

Since this is the case, it may be asked, why, if one party in religion attacked the opinions of Hume, another did not defend them? why, if Beattie and Warburton couched the lance, Whitefield and John Erskine did not come forward as his champions? In the first place, it was only those who united reason and revelation as going hand in hand and aiding each other, that looked at books of philosophy with an eye to their influence on religion, and such works formed a department of literature in which the advocates of "eternal decrees" would not expect to find much to suit their purpose. But, in the second place, this class of religious thinkers are all, except the few [281]who are hypocrites, devout and serious people, and Hume's method of treating these subjects was not such as they could feel a sympathy with. A want of proper deference for devotional feeling, is a defect that runs through all his works—a constitutional organic defect it might be termed. There is no ribaldry, but at the same time there are no expressions of decent reverence; while this religious party knew from the manner in which their predecessors in the same doctrines were historically treated by Hume, that if there were any coincidence in abstract opinions, there was very little in common between their sympathies and his.

In this same section on miracles, there are repeated protests against the reader assuming that the writer is arguing against the Christian faith. Against some Catholic miracles, which were asserted to be proved by testimony as strong as that which attested the miracles of our Saviour, he says, "As if the testimony of man could ever be put in the balance with that of God himself, who conducted the pen of the inspired writers!" and again, "Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is by no means fitted to endure." These protests however were made briefly and coldly, and in such a manner as made people feel, that if Hume believed in the doctrines they announced, he certainly had not his heart in them. Hence, although, since the origin of rationalism, evangelical Christians have frequently had recourse to the arguments of Hume, there was long in that quarter a not unnatural reluctance to appeal to them.

It is perhaps one of the most remarkable warnings against hasty judgments on the effects of efforts of subtle reasoning, that, according to later scientific [282]discoveries, no two things are in more perfect unison than Hume's theory of belief in miracles, and the belief that miracles, according to the common acceptation of the term, have actually taken place. The leading principle of this theory is, in conformity with its author's law of cause and effect, that where our experience has taught us that two things follow each other as cause and effect by an unvarying sequence, if we hear of an instance in which this has not been the case, we ought to doubt the truth of the narrative. In other words, if we are told of some circumstance having taken place out of the usual order of nature, we ought not to believe it; because the circumstance of the narrator having been deceived, or of his designedly telling a falsehood, is more probable than an event contradictory to all previous authenticated experience. It is a rule for marking the boundary and proper application of the inductive system, and one that is highly serviceable to science. But, in applying it to use, we must not be led away by the narrow application, in common conversation, of the word experience. There is the experience of the common workman, and there is the experience of the philosopher. There is that observation of phenomena which makes a ditcher know that the difficulty of pulling out a loosened stone with a mattock indicates it to be so many inches thick; and that observation, fully as sure, which shows the geologist that the stratum of the Pennsylvanian grauwacke is upwards of a hundred miles thick. The experience and observation of the husbandman teach him, that when the opposite hill is distinct to his view, the intervening atmosphere is not charged with vapour; but observation, not less satisfactory, shows the astronomer that Jupiter and the Moon have around them no atmosphere such as [283]that by which our planet is enveloped. Now there is nothing more fully founded on experimental observation than the fact, that there was a time when the present order of the world was not in existence. That there have been convulsions, such as, did we now hear of their contemporary occurrence, instead of attesting their past existence through the sure course of observation and induction, we would at once maintain to be impossible. To this then, and this only, comes the theory of miracles, that at the present day, and for a great many years back, the accounts that are given of circumstances having taken place out of the general order of nature, are to be discredited, because between the two things to be believed, the falsehood of the narrative is more likely than the truth of the occurrence. But the very means by which we arrive at this conclusion bring us to another, that there was a time to which the rules taken from present observation of the course of nature did not apply.[283:1]