there was much to interest a would-be ecclesiastical historian. Both Colin Kidd and David Allan have drawn attention to the differing accounts of the Scottish Church given by Catholics, by English and Scottish Episcopalians, and by Presbyterians of various sorts.45 Politics could not be avoided in their discussions, which were aimed at establishing the independence (or dependence) of the Scottish church and state from (or upon) England or Rome. Much of that publishing came at a time when deists were challenging old accounts of religious history by deriding miracles, a superintending providence, privileging the Bible as a source of historical information, and finding in priestcraft and kingcraft the key to the development of states and churches. History had had, and still had, practical consequences for the Scottish economy and culture and for the peace and security of Britain and countries in Europe. After 1720, it had become difficult to see ecclesiastical history in the blinkered way that had previously prevailed. Realism also came from an understanding of the political and religious compromises made in 1690, 1707, and the years that followed.
V
There is also a wider context in which Hume’s ecclesiastical history project should be situated. Having considered the history of the English church for about thirteen hundred years and seen it from the perspectives of men of diverse opinions, Hume must have thought it was surely time to rethink the enterprise of ecclesiastical historians. In many cases, the critical acumen applied to the understanding of manuscripts and textual problems was at odds with the lack of critical judgment shown when it came to larger questions of religion and politics. For details, high churchmen like George Hickes or Thomas Hearne were necessary guides but not when it came to the grander themes. Hume was also aware of a surprising number of their continental counterparts whose works also show up in the notes to The History of England. Most of those scholars were still captive to the inerrant Bible and to the progeny of Eusebius and Augustine. When Hume was in France, he seems to have had little to do with men in the Académie des Inscriptions, but he did meet a number of less orthodox historians including Charles Duclos, the Abbé Raynal, Présidents de Henault and de Brosses, and minor figures such as the Abbé Le Blanc, who had translated into French Hume’s Political Discourses (1752) and William Robertson’s History of Charles V (1769). Perhaps the man whose works affected him most was one whom he never met—Voltaire.
There was more going on among historians of religion than he may have been aware. We lack evidence that he was, but that should not dissuade us from looking closer at the nature of that work. Radical biblical criticism had been coming out steadily since the mid-seventeenth century from Hobbes, Spinoza, their epigones, and from Bayle and the deists. Many of the ideas expressed in their works were common knowledge, and Hume had read those authors. It is unlikely that Hume knew that Dr. Jean Astruc, to whom he delivered a letter in 1764, was the anonymous author of the groundbreaking Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la genèse (1753). That short work undercut orthodox beliefs in the divine inspiration of the mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch by showing that parts of it were composed of different accounts that had been conflated into the present text.46 It is also unlikely that Hume knew anything of the works of the German thinkers who had begun to approach the Bible in novel ways. Hermann Samuel Reimarius, in isolation and secrecy, had begun to recast Christological questions, which he assumed had to be treated like any other questions about the facts of the past. G. E. Lessing was moving in the same direction. The more orthodox philologist, Johann David Michaelis, as he reconstructed the society of the ancient Hebrews, reduced them to the status of just another rather uncivilized Middle Eastern people. In Aberdeen, where George Campbell was already at work on a translation of the Gospels, that message would be understood, although its radical implications were rejected. Germans were doing the sort of thing that had been done to some extent by Bishops William Warburton and Robert Lowth. Lowth had made it possible to see the Old Testament as the product of a rude people hooked on metaphors, a people who were not closely related to the Christians of the New Testament. Indeed, the Hebrews were closer to the Greeks of the Homeric world, but this was not quite the compliment which it had been in the lectures of Patrick Cuming. Once the Hebrews had been put into a historical context, the Bible had to be treated like any other old text. It could then be seen to deal with local and particular matters, not those of world historical importance. Such critics, often clerics, had come perilously close to breaking the prophetic thread that was, up to that time, held to connect the two Testaments. Theirs were not altogether new messages, but they were now not being stated by a disreputable Irish priest’s son, like John Toland, but by respectable men holding university and church positions even as they relegated church history to a section of universal history mostly concerned with politics. Their theories and those of their French counterparts were the subjects of enlightened conversations.
Finally, there were other continental influences that had some importance for eighteenth-century men thinking about ecclesiastical history. Those lie in the struggles of European rulers to control and regulate religious life in their domains. The greatest example of this was seen in the policies adopted and the actions taken by Louis XIV against Jansenists and Huguenots. Those were related to Louis’s efforts to bolster Roman Catholicism and to create what some saw as a universal monarchy. His career supplied many writers with all they needed to understand both priestcraft and kingcraft. In relatively tolerant Britain, the government faced nonjurors in both Scotland and England. It imposed greater controls on the Scottish Kirk through the imposition of toleration and patronage (1710–12) and by the management of the General Assembly. In England, it finally prohibited the meetings of Convocation after 1719. Everywhere those struggles centered on politics, on appointments, on the control of lands alienated to the Church, on the control of Jesuits and other orders, and on the rights of the Church and Papacy in various countries. Everywhere governments feared the enthusiasm provoked by Jansenists or expressed in the revivals conducted in France and Italy by Saint Alphonsus Ligouri. Protestant countries had to deal with enthusiastic Calvinists, Methodists, and dissenters from national churches who sometimes preferred exile and emigration to obeying their rulers. Greater freedom of the press and of expression now made it possible for men of letters to argue that religious behavior had always been like that and would be manipulated and controlled by those who found it in their interest to do so.
VI
Had Hume written an ecclesiastical history, he would have used the many elements already to hand. The conjectural historians, with their blend of social science and realistic data derived from the study of primitive societies, offered new perspectives on the ancient world of both the pagans and the People of God. Some of this, when provided by men like Lowth or Thomas Blackwell, the Marischal College principal and professor of Greek, had become quite acceptable although not when used to demean the Judeo-Christian myths and stories. Hume may have believed for a while that he could do better and that there was glory to be had if one succeeded. It might have gotten him into no more trouble than had the essay on miracles and the “Natural History of Religion.” Adopting an ironic and ambiguous stance was something he had long ago mastered. Irony more delicately veiled and explanations more finely wrought would allow him to écraser l’infâme as well as Voltaire. Less conjectural historical studies had included church history in universal and civil histories that were essentially political. The ways of understanding history Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume himself had supplied offered other ways to secularize accounts of the past. And the very philosophes who teased Hume to write such a work could have given him a model from the Encyclopédie, on which some of them were working. There we find three related articles that are pertinent.
In the first, “Ecclesiastique (l’histoire ecclesiastique)”, “Ecclesiastical History” is defined as “whatever has happened in the Church since its beginnings,” an ambiguous definition that applies either to the Church Triumphant or the Church Militant. It invited reflections on many unsavory topics. The ambiguities deepen as the very short article concludes:
M. Fleuri47 nous l’a donnée dans un ouvrage excellent qui porte ce titre; il a joint à l’ouvrage des discours raisonnés, plus estimables & plus précieux encore que son histoire. Ce judicieux écrivain, en développant dans
