scholars, including historians, he wrote a report on the first appearance of syphilis in Scotland (1496) and an account of a house struck by lightning. Both were noticed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.33 His book purchases show us a man who read widely and wanted to own works such as Bayle’s Dictionaire Philosophique et Critique (1697). He drew on that and on Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–72) for some of the intellectual history he included in his courses.
Mackie taught two courses.34 His universal history course (which might be called “Western Civilization”) ran over two years. The other was a yearly course on Rome designed to make the study of Roman law easier. The first began with Creation, but it turned into a mostly political history, which went up to the Reformation and included bits of Scottish history too. Mackie did not give undue attention to religion and often treated it as another aspect of society to be discussed in a secular fashion. He wanted his boys to know who the principal Fathers of the Church were and why they were famous, but he treated them much as he did their pagan rulers.
Politics dominated the affairs of nations and helped to explain nonpolitical events. Mackie was also interested in politics at the international level and wanted his students to read parts of Thomas Rymer’s mostly posthumous Foedera (1704–35), a great collection of charters and treaties. Those tended to see churches as social factors among others. All churches in this world are, to some extent, merely political institutions reflecting the national character of the people who attend them.
Mackie’s historical world was full of nations with distinctive national characters. After it appeared in the 1730s, he recommended Charles Rollin’s Ancient History to his students, who found there sketches of the characters of ancient peoples, which were used to explain their histories. Rollin’s work saw the character of peoples reflected in all their institutions. National character in Rollin’s works, or in Mackie’s lectures, did not change much over time, but their treatment of it was one that leads to Montesquieu and Hume. They would see manners and institutions interacting in social wholes of a dynamic sort. That message was implicit in much that he taught.
The Franks described by Gregory of Tours, on whose works Mackie relied, could not possibly be a genteel people. They acted on passions they had not learned to control. Mackie on the world of Chilperic might have seemed long-winded to his students, but they would have come from his lectures with an appreciation of how much manners and customs mattered and how religious values affected them and were affected by them. The acceptance of the Christian religion among the Franks as described by Gregory was one that required the alteration of barbarian manners and the acceptance of new values that would result in chivalric attitudes and the formation of a new ethos. Ecclesiastical history in his classroom had little to do with the Church Triumphant but a lot to do with the sordid affairs of men in the Church Militant. Mackie knew that manners change with the growth of politeness and knowledge and that they change in what seems a cyclical manner.
Professor Mackie, like Anderson, the Glasgow historian, was interested in questions of evidence and in rules by which we might eliminate the “many vulgar errors which have crept into history.”35 The first of those he listed was “a strong passion for illustrious origins” such as the Greek’s propensity to trace their descent from gods and goddesses. The early modern historians’ eagerness to find among the Trojans ancestors for modern kings, who would then be the equals of the Roman founder Aeneas, was not much different. Mackie was as sure as Varro and Hume that all history came in three kinds—“obscure or unknown, fabulous, and Historical”—or that for which “vouchers” were to be had. Mackie even found his vouchers among artifacts and archaeological remains. If they paid attention to the vouchers, learned men would not have believed in the legend of the Golden Tooth ridiculed by Fontenelle, or in Pope Joan and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, about whom Mackie also spoke in class. Historians had to free themselves from such prejudices but also get their dates right.
Like many of his time, Mackie had a fascination with chronology. This rested on the fact that chronologies had not been established for most countries and were much contested for the ancient world, where the problems of relating Judeo-Christian chronology to the dating of events in the histories of other peoples had not been solved.36 Ancient traditions had some value, but they needed to be critically scrutinized and the tales of bards and poets set aside as worthless. Other old accounts were clearly forgeries.37 Credulity, religious and political biases, individual peculiarities, and the illusions of whole peoples all add errors to our perceptions of the past. Ecclesiastical history, if it was to be respectable, had to conform to the same standards as civil history. It was no better than its sources, and those seemed less adequate than they had once been.
While Hume took neither of Mackie’s courses, he had relatives and friends who did; he would have known what was being taught by the professor.38 Hume also knew William Rouet, who became professor of ecclesiastical history at Glasgow in 1752. Rouet may never have taught a course specifically on ecclesiastical history, but he tried to teach a universal history course that was polite.39 Rouet has had something of a bad press as a sinecurist, but he deserves better. He shared Mackie’s virtues but went beyond him in interesting ways. Rouet wanted history to give the causes of the events it narrated: “History should not be Confin’d to the bare recital of facts such as gaining or losing a battle, the rise or fall of an Empire, but we ought carefully to endeavour to Investigate the reasons & secret Causes which contributed to bring this or that remarkable event.”40 When it came to setting out those causes, Rouet showed that he owed as much to reading Montesquieu, Hume, and Voltaire as to Rollin, whose Ancient History he also recommended to his students:
[We ought] to be well acquainted wt ye Manners, customs, Genius & Character peculiar to each Nations generally & of all ye Extraordinary men, who through ye importance of ye Station they bore in ye Country, or from ye uncommon abilities they possess’d might possibly have greatly contributed to bring about any remarkable alterations in ye Changes of States or fortune of ye publick. When our knowledge in history is founded upon this firm and proper basis it can’t fail of producing both pleasure & profit to ye Mind.41
Such history would be “providential” and would teach us “the vanity of earthly things.”42 His history preserved a pious gloss, but its substance was different. Moreover, he told his classes that there was no pure church history:
church History consider’d entirely by itself, without any politicall Connections or references to ye Civil history of these times must in itself be imperfect, and unsatisfactory, but when carefully connected, & illustrated by a more accurate scrutiny into ye manners, Customs & political Maxims of ye Different Countries, or Governours, where ye Religious revolutions happen’d, Church history, consider’d in this view becomes one of the most regular & instructive & most interesting connected parts of Universal history, & actively contradict[s] that Sarcasm of Grotius Dum Historiam Ecclesiasticam legis Quid legis nisi Episcoparum.43
Rouet’s history is this-worldly and rather like Hume’s in several respects. Charlemagne is like the Alfred of The History of England. Rouet’s periodization resembles Hume’s, and the bases for it are much the same, although Rouet gives less attention to economics. They were similar in their attitudes to medieval sources. Those can be used but with caution, for they are the products of benighted times and have information mostly about the lifetimes of the writers. For both, modernity comes not with Charlemagne but with the Renaissance and Reformation. Rouet gave more time to politics and diplomacy, but, like Hume, he was also interested in the arts. Fragments of “Lectures on Ancient Painting” survive in his papers. Rouet presented the history of art in a cyclical mold with the Renaissance recapitulating the discoveries of the Greek and Roman artists, albeit at a higher level of achievement.44 Rouet had moved his universal and ecclesiastical history in a more polite and secular direction than had any other teacher in Scotland to that date. Hume would have seen that trend as needing extension.
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