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CHAPTER 2

The Kirk

Hume’s moderation had, however, been acquired. It was fashioned by rebellion against the dogmatic and austere civilization that bred him. Beneath the bland surface of his life, there is another story that begins with Scotland in the early decades of the eighteenth century, where Calvinism still ruled with much of its early strength but little of the grandeur. It produced a tension that shaped Hume’s genius, and determined his development from a son of the Kirk to an outrageous infidel philosopher and finally to a worldly essayist and historian. Although puritanism survived in England as well, and inspired Hume’s heirs, there it took on subtler, sophisticated shapes. In Scotland puritanism had its last moment of simplicity, and the emotions it fed on and generated, obscured later by intellectual wrappings, could still be seen plainly.

The Reformation had not, as in England, reduced religion to a political and individual concern. Instead, it replaced Catholicism with another complete interpretation of all the facts of existence. The Calvinism that took over in Scotland (everywhere but the Highlands) removed from Christianity all pagan vestiges. It not only forbade outward emblems, ceremonies, and images, and emphasized the justice and infinite, awful majesty of God, rather than love or hope of salvation; it aspired to read the Divine Will, and in place of the contemptuous indifference that had characterized Scotland under Romanism, it brought an unqualified dogmatism. The Old Church was swept away rather than reformed and there was little left to temper the zeal of the Reformation.

The events of the following centuries confirmed the most extreme tendencies. Under Cromwell, all but rigid Covenanters were excluded from power, and Scotland was placed thoroughly under the heel of the Church. When the Episcopal clergy returned during the Restoration and in turn dismissed the Presbyterians, they effectively destroyed any hope for a moderate Presbyterianism. In exile, the older men acquired what Bishop Burnet called “a tangled scrupulosity,” a habit of enlarging minor differences into great issues, in short, a fanaticism that pursued victory at all costs. The younger men had little opportunity to become learned and knew only that the Lord’s Word was worth more than all the pagan learning. They were “rude in mind and manners, grimly religious and bigotted in spirit.”¹ As a result, the Presbyterians, restored to power upon the landing of William of Orange, were distinguished chiefly by their zeal in purging the Episcopal clergy. They were proud of their vulgarity and ignorance, opposed to philosophy, to the classics, to all learning, addicted to a puritanism that, having excluded the most powerful intellectual elements, was left with little more than its harshness.

A decline in their influence began as a result of the union with England in 1707. The union re-opened Scotland to the outside world and stimulated the growth of another spirit, along with industrial and commercial changes that were to transform it from a poor, barren country into one of the more enterprising and prosperous industrial nations of the world. In the Church, the group of Moderates who came to dominate it in the middle decades of the century began gathering strength. But during the youth and early manhood of David Hume, the prevailing spirit in Scotland was still that of the Covenanters. Their spiritual austerity found a natural environment in the material conditions of the country, which still bore the marks of years of turbulence. Trade was stagnant, houses deserted, agriculture poor. There was nothing left of those earlier days when Scotland was much closer to France than England, when the lairds far outshone the rude English barons. Instead, even rich lairds no longer enjoyed any splendour. They were strangers to luxuries like delicate furnishings, windows that opened, desserts, or fine clothes, and were rarely at all learned or refined. There was nothing anywhere to brighten the atmosphere of gloom and hopelessness in which the grimmest sort of religion flourished.

Paganism survived only in the form of superstitious fears, in the belief in charmers and sorcerers who thrived in remote places, and, above all, in the fear of Satan. He was never absent, and the acknowledged source of all carnal thoughts. A mysterious sound, an unexpected ailment, a spasm of doubt were proof of Satan’s power, and civil and ecclesiastical authorities united to exorcise him by hunting witches with organized cruelty. Nor was there less to fear from God, whom pious Scotsmen regarded as an implacable despot to be served with unremitting devotion in a vain effort to escape His wrath. For the doctrine of election, which they held in all its severity, taught that Christ died only for the elect and left all the rest of mankind with no remedy against the fury of God. On earth, one could hope only for a commonwealth ruled by saints according to laws derived from studying the Bible.

The few humane and polite Moderate ministers had little following. Instead, the people flocked to hear the more terrifying preachers, especially the “left-wing,” ultra-Evangelicals, who gave them crude but dramatic discourses on how they would spend eternity in the company of grisly devils, howling and roaring in everlasting torment. These preachers further endeared themselves to their audience by pursuing a number of worthy objects: the persecution of Episcopalians, the proscription of Roman Catholics, the extermination of witches, the re-establishment of a theocracy. And they were indefatigable inquisitors into higher matters. Nothing was too mysterious for them, be it the secret designs of the Deity before creation or the fate of man for all eternity. The most popular and influential preacher, Thomas Boston, sold his published sermons by the thousands to peasants, shepherds, pedlars, and lairds. His message was ever full of hell-fire and wrath:

The Damned … must depart from God into everlasting Fire. I am not in a mind to dispute, what Kind of Fire it is. … Whether a material fire or not? Experience will more than satisfy the Curiosity of those, who are disposed rather to dispute about it, than to seek how to escape it. … Hell-fire will not only pierce into the Bodies, but directly into the Souls of the Damn’d. … How vehement must that Fire be that pierceth directly into the Soul, and makes an everlasting Burning in the Spirit, the most lively and tender Part of a Man, wherein Wounds or Pains are most intolerable. … When one is cast into a burning fiery Furnace, the Fire makes its way into the very Bowels, and leaves no Member untouch’d.¹

Although he exhorted sinners to reform, Boston gave them little hope of success, and concentrated rather on their natural sinfulness. Professor Blackwell explained that it was an act of grace and benevolence for God to have made a covenant with Adam whereby he put all mankind’s stock, so to speak, into one ship.² Everyone agreed that when Adam fell, man became a rank, stinking, corrupt creature; his physical beauty in the state of innocence was transformed into a monstrous body, so hideous and vile that it had to be kept under cover.

It was shown again and again that only faith, not morality, mattered. Besides, any hint that there might be natural virtue or light in a human soul was greeted with a charge of heresy. The total corruption of every man, woman, and child was beyond question; even a new-born infant was but a “lump of wrath, a child of hell.” To the preachers it was obvious that the heart of man could harbour no good thought or desire, for the Creator would never let his image dwell so near the effigies of the devil. “Hear O Sinner, what is thy case,” Boston commanded, and explained lucidly:

Innumerable Sins compass thee about; Mountains of Guilt are lying upon thee; Floods of Impurities overwhelm thee. Living Lusts, of all Sorts roll up and down in the dead Sea of thy Soul; where no Good can breathe because of the Corruption there. … The Thoughts and imaginations of thy Heart are only evil. … O sad Reckoning! As many Thoughts, Words, Actions, as many Sins. …¹

The duty of ministers was to convince the people that “unregenerate morality can never please God, and in this state of wrath and curse is loathed by Him.” It was blasphemy to preach that performing the ordinary duties made man less noxious to God, for while morality was desirable in its place, it was “soul ruining,” and led to perdition when it taught men to depend on their own merits. William Land, minister of Crimond about the beginning of the eighteenth century, was deposed for saying in a Synod sermon that virtue was more natural to the human race than vice.² Later in the century, the seceder Adam Gib could still protest that preaching moral duties called men to what “was absolutely impracticable and leading to eternal perdition.”³ Even in 1837, the new Principal of Edinburgh College was subjected to a prosecution in the Edinburgh Presbytery, on the charge of failing to preach the doctrine of original sin in its full rigour, denying the right of the civil power to punish heresy, denying that well-established doctrines should set the limits of enquiry, and showing undue charity to heathens and lapsed Christians.⁴

Nothing was allowed to escape the universal blight and the effect on morality was hardly salutary. Discourses on the true “Scriptural and Rational way of preaching the Gospel” taught that the beasts also partook of sin and were therefore ferocious, repulsive, and carnivorous. That vegetables were just as cursed was evident from the weeds, brambles, thistles, and nettles that laid barren the ground. Lazy Scots farmers accordingly pleaded that they dared not clear the weeds for dread of interfering with the divine sentence on the soil. Some troubled sinners gave up in despair, others felt free to indulge in reckless vice, while those who felt assured of election were inspired to neglect conduct and duty. An English visitor to Scotland in the ’thirties protested: “I wish these ministers would speak oftener and more civilly than they do, of morality.” Yet even when they did speak of it, not much was accomplished—“one would think there was no sin, according to them, but fornication; or other virtues besides keeping the Sabbath.”¹

While eternal bliss was not to be had by moral conduct, any attempt to find pleasure in life on earth was strictly censured. Gratification of the senses, in whatever form, was ruled out. “Since the Eyes of our first Parents were opened to the forbidden Fruit,” Thomas Boston instructed the pious, “Men’s Eyes have been the Gates of Destruction to their Souls.”² All amusements were equally sinful—dancing, carnal; cards, dangerous; poetry, fanciful; tales, frivolous and untrue; dicing, an impious usurpation of the lots appointed by God. The world was not merely coupled with the flesh and the devil—it was the flesh and the devil. It was an enemy’s country to be plundered, but never enjoyed, for enjoyment, like beauty, was a snare of the enemy. The good Presbyterian was always at war, or at most resting between battles, his only purpose in life being to fight against evil. He was affronted by everything—by a neighbour who was heard through the wall being amorous to his own wife, by a townsman who took the Spectator, or a friend who sent his daughter to a boarding school. He never indulged even in the pleasure of ordinary grief. Upon the death of a promising child, the proud and pious parent recorded 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 do more. For the Deity presented by natural religion was not an object of either sense or imagination; He was invisible and incomprehensible. He could not therefore be either understood or loved. As vulgar minds, however, found it difficult to believe in an abstract object, they soon began to give the Deity “some sensible representation; such as either the more conspicuous parts of nature, or the statues, images, and pictures, which a more refined age forms of its divinities.”³

But in thinking that they could know God, or have some feeling for Him, men deceived themselves. They were agitated by hope and fear, or moved by vanity to esteem themselves the Deity’s favourite objects; or at best, they were actuated by a “forced and strained affection.” In fact, their religion merely degraded the Deity into a resemblance to themselves, in order to make Him something that they could understand and worship.⁴ Thus religious belief invariably degenerated into idolatry (and superstition) or fanaticism (and enthusiasm). Of the two possibilities, idolatry was far preferable. It developed out of “weakness, fear, melancholy,” feelings that were favourable to priestly power, rites, and ceremonies. But this was the kindlier, less dangerous alternative. A ceremonial religion was more tolerant and sociable.¹ There was no exclusiveness about the old pagan religions. When the oracle of Delphi was asked to say what rites or forms of worship were most acceptable to the gods, it answered, “Those which are legally established in each city.”² Besides, paganism sat lightly on men’s minds, for it consisted only of a “multitude of stories” that made no “deep impression on the affections and understanding.” They were “light, easy, and familiar,” not at all terrifying—“Who could forbear smiling when he thought of the loves of Mars and Venus or the amorous frolics of Jupiter and Pan?”³ Best of all, paganism confined religious duties to sacrifices in the temple, and left men, once outside the temple, free to think what they pleased.⁴

Far worse was an abstract theistic religion that required men to approach God directly, and gave them no “sensible exterior observances” to occupy the mind during religious exercises and “abate the violence of its disappointed efforts.” It arose out of presumption, along with hope, imagination, and ignorance, and inspired “a fierce and gloomy spirit of devotion.” Laud should have been praised, rather than condemned for trying to revive some of the primitive popish institutions. They freed thought from concentration “on that divine and mysterious essence so superior to the narrow capacities of mankind”; they let the mind “relax itself in the contemplation of pictures, postures, vestments, buildings3. …,”⁵ and softened the spirit of proud worshippers. Christianity had enough of a disadvantage in its insistence on a single and universal God. A single God was so easily made a pretence for declaring the worship of all other Deities impious and absurd, and insisting that all men had to share the same faith and ceremonies. Monotheism always invited zeal and rancour, “the most furious and implacable of all human passions.” The Jews were ever moved by an “implacable narrow spirit”; the Mohammedans followed “even more bloody principles …,” and the inquisitors from Rome and Madrid, who invariably denounced virtue, knowledge, and love of liberty, offered up more human sacrifices than did barbarous nations. Indeed the intolerance of religions that affirm the unity of God was as remarkable, Hume declared, as the tolerance of polytheism.¹

There was, moreover, no escape from abstract, theistic religion. It invaded every moment, every feeling, thought, and action. It “inspects our whole conduct, and prescribes a universal rule to our actions, to our words, to our very thoughts and inclinations; a rule so much the more austere, as it is guarded by infinite, though distant rewards and punishments, and no infraction of it can ever be concealed or disguised.”² And it did nothing to improve life on earth. Whereas pagans were inspired by their gods to live well and happily, to develop “activity, spirit, courage, magnanimity, love of liberty, and all the virtues which aggrandize a people,” belief in a single God, supposed to be infinitely superior to men, subjected men to terror and suffering, led them to believe that he required of them nothing but “the monkish virtues of mortification, penance, humility and passive suffering.”³

The more profound spiritual effects were even worse. Whereas paganism emphasized ceremonies and idols, abstract theistic religion insisted on conformity in feelings and beliefs. But the ability to fulfil inner obligations, as it depends ultimately on grace, cannot be summoned at will. A worshipper can control only his profession of belief. If asked to do more, he must resort to hypocrisy, of which he himself will often be unaware. It is perhaps a less false hypocrisy than other kinds, but therefore all the more insidious. Men who dare not confess their doubts even to themselves, disguise their infidelity, in private too, by the “strongest asseverations and most positive bigotry.”⁴ The colder their hearts, the greater their fervour in religious exercises, and thus they become accustomed to fraud and falsehood and acquire a “habit of dissimulation.” It is no wonder that the man who shows the highest zeal in religion is commonly distrusted and believed to be ready to deceive and cheat in everything.⁵

Having discovered the pretensions of the Kirk, and of religious enthusiasts in general, Hume bound himself to undermine them. The “enemies to joy and pleasure” had to be exposed as “hypocrites and deceivers.”¹ He would show that “celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues” should rather be placed in the catalogue of vices, for they served no purpose but to “stupefy the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy, and sour the temper. …” The man who lived by such rules—“a gloomy, harebrained enthusiast”—perhaps deserved after his death a place in the calendar of saints, but he should never in life, Hume was certain, be welcomed by anyone who was not “as delirious and dismal as himself.”² One had only to remove the “dismal dress” in which virtue had been clothed to reveal her true “gentleness, humanity, beneficence, affability, nay even, at proper intervals, play, frolic, and gaiety”; then it would become clear that virtue did not require “useless austerities and rigours, suffering and self-denial,” but wished rather to make “her votaries and all mankind, during every instant of their existence, if possible, cheerful and happy.”³

He began to question right down to the foundation, and there grew upon him “a certain boldness of temper” which would not submit to any authority and led him to seek “some new medium by which truth might be establisht.” He gave up all pretence of studying law, for which his family had destined him, and announced his intention of becoming a man of letters, “a Scholar and Philosopher.”⁴