only that, “He was a pleasant child and desirable, grave and wise beyond his years, a reprover of sin among his comrades, frequent in his private devotions as he was capable.”3
No moment of life was outside the jurisdiction of the Church. It commanded that family exercises be held every day, and before communion, the minister inquired whether each household had complied. Every night, at nine or ten o’clock, elders went through the streets and taverns to dismiss any loiterers. The week was crowned by a sabbath more rigorous than anything enforced by the English Puritans, equal only to the New England Sabbath. No food was to be cooked, no fire lit; it was a crime to save a boat endangered by a storm, to whistle or walk in the roads, to grind snuff, feed the cattle, or bring water to a sick person. Children, as well as adults, submitted to endless sermons, instruction, and prayers, and were forbidden to go out of doors. The only amusement, open to all, was reporting on delinquents to the Kirk, or better still, hearing the minister enlarge on the doom of sinners who, clad in sackcloth, were made to stand on a platform or in front of the pulpit for as many as 26 Sundays until the minister was assured of their penitence. All offences, whether serious or trivial, were treated in the same way, and no one was safe from his neighbours’ scrupulous oversight. When “visitants” from the Presbytery arrived, accusations were most welcome, and not infrequently the minister found himself charged along with the rest for being wanting in reverence or for having broken the sabbath by setting up a fallen sheaf in the field. To compel a suspect to appear, or to stand at the pillar if he tried to take his rebuke from his seat, the Church could employ the sheriff. And a refusal to obey the orders of the Presbytery to “stand rebuke” was punished by excommunication, “being delivered over to Satan,” banished from the Church, in short, being made an outcast from society, a sentence few could bear.
That David Hume escaped intimate acquaintance with this spirit is most unlikely. His parish, Chirnside, was distinguished for being a stronghold of fanaticism within a generally more tolerant area, the Merse. During the Episcopacy, in 1676, some forty Covenanters, from Chirnside and its village persisted in worshipping at conventicles. After the defeat of Episcopacy the Presbyterianism that returned in 1689 with the Rev. Henry Erskine was uncompromising enough to win praise from Thomas Boston. It is doubtful that Erskine’s influence can have worn off very soon after his death; that it lingered on is suggested by the fact that as late as 1873, Chirnside boasted of a Church belonging to the Cameronians, the most illiberal of Scottish sects. Most probably, Hume’s uncle, George Home, the son of a covenanting father, was an Evangelical, “godly minister,” whose sermons in the Chirnside Kirk and weekly visits to the family did not much enhance the joys of the sabbath. There was, in any case, no lack of opportunity for David Hume to become well acquainted with religious enthusiasm.
As a boy, he seems to have been quite as pious as his uncle required. Although the book he read assiduously was condemned by the Covenanters of 1690 as superstitious and erroneous, the Whole Duty of Man seems austere enough by any other discerning standard. It did not lead him far astray, to judge by his amusements as a child—abstracting a list of the vices catalogued at the end of the Whole Duty and testing himself against them, “for instance, to try if, notwithstanding his excelling his schoolfellows, he had no pride or vanity.” As Hume told Boswell, this soul-searching which was routine in the Kirk, was “strange work.”1 The catalogue of sins included such offences as “not arranging any set of solemn rites for humiliation and confession, or too seldom,” “making pleasure, not health, the end of eating,” “wasting the time or estate in good fellowship.” In an old manuscript book, he recorded all his doubts, so as to expose and refute them. He tried again and again to dissipate them, to subdue his imagination and remain at peace with the common opinion. When at last he admitted failure, it was in a way against his will.
Exactly how he arrived at his aversion to Calvinist faith and morality, Hume never explained. But it seems clear that he had become an infidel well before he was twenty. His exposure to the university in Edinburgh, at the age of twelve, undoubtedly provided much of the stimulus. There the contrast between the Covenanting spirit and that of civilization was made very evident. At the same time, the college kept alive for him impressions of life under the Kirk: students not only had to attend church services and observe the sabbath in the usual way; they were examined on doctrinal questions and on the sermons they heard; they had to take turns at opening a class with a prayer, and their private devotions and opinions were overseen by censors and regents. But also another spirit was abroad. The course of study, though carefully supervised, included the Latin classics, certainly Cicero, Horace, Virgil; the study of Greek; and very likely Locke and Newton. And the contrast between the secular authors and the Covenanters was underscored by the society at Edinburgh which had become a centre of cultural revival in Scotland.
By the time Hume came to the university, the effects of the union and the exposure to England had become marked, at least in Edinburgh. Some years before Hume had arrived there, a group of faculty and students of law and divinity had organized the Rankenian Club, to promote good English style and literary taste, and general freedom of thinking. The influence of the club did much to encourage literature and a more liberal culture in Scotland, a preference for metaphysical disquisitions over theological or political controversies which had until then absorbed all intellectual energies. When, after his first two years at Edinburgh, Hume returned to study law, his literary ambitions led him to the more worldly and cultivated society available then. He became very friendly with Allan Ramsay, son of the bookseller poet, whose circulating library had become the centre of a literary circle and was often denounced by the authorities for spreading vice and obscenity. He also became attached to Henry Home of Kames, a man of wide learning, elegant tastes, and marked philosophic interests. And his closest friend was Michael Ramsay, described by some as “a very debauched, licentious creature,” in any case, an intellectual young man, far from puritan. In this company, Hume reread the Latin poets, orators, and philosophers, as well as Newton and Bacon; he became acquainted more intimately with Locke, Clarke, and Bayle; he learned French and read the French classics, besides the more polished English writers, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope. Prodded on by their influence, Hume began to dig deeper, to ask himself just what he did or should believe.
From the emphasis in his adult invective, it seems likely that the taint of hypocrisy in religious enthusiasm first inspired him to doubt. There is an echo of a personal experience and excuse, a suggestion that he began by disliking the flavour of his own devotion in the line: “Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asserverations and the most positive bigotry.”1 Once he had grown sensitive to his own dissembling, he began to detect the symptoms in others, and finally to see the whole of his religion in a new perspective. Thereafter, he could never speak about religion without heat. Whenever he referred to the Puritans in England, Covenanters in Scotland, to zealots and enthusiasts of any kind, he betrayed the sort of animus that a strongly felt reaction against early beliefs often produces. Even when he guarded his expression, sensitive Christians could feel his deep-seated antipathy to them.
In whatever context he spoke on religion, his theme was always the same—the contrast between the bigotry and austerity of Christianity, particularly of abstract, Protestant Christianity, and the easy, tolerant, life-giving spirit of paganism. Pagan religions, Hume said more than once, “contented themselves with divinising lust, incest, adultery; but the predestinarian doctors have divinised cruelty, wrath, fury, vengeance, and all the blackest vices.” All popular religions were varieties of “daemonism,” but those that exalted the Deity most, like Christianity, gave Him the most detestable character, and by forcing worshippers into pretending to adore what at heart they found reprehensible, compounded guilt with misery: “The heart secretly detests such measures of cruel and implacable vengeance; but the judgement dares not but pronounce them perfect and adorable. And the additional misery of this inward struggle aggravates all the other terrors, by which the unhappy victims to superstition are forever haunted.”1
Certainly, there was a remarkable order and unity in nature—“All things are evidently of a piece.”2 Every rational inquirer was disposed to look for a source of this order and to find good reason for believing in an intelligent author of nature. But he could not reasonably