out to show that the Jews were the oldest people with the oldest and best history. The Hebrews were the first people of God, who had been succeeded by the Christians. Voltaire’s universal history made the oldest people the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, not the Jews who were somewhat ignored in his article on “Histoire” in the Encyclopédie.16 He explained the religious beliefs and practices of the gentile nations not as the corruptions of Hebrew originals but as the creations of primitive peoples much like those whom Hume had described. There had to be a new universal history constructed around climate, race, manners, laws, the arts, commerce, and the evolution of those as they were changed and were shaped by peoples and their great men.17 Christian history should have no privileged status in the realm of learning. God’s providence was not to be inferred from the disasters of the past. There was no special causality needed to understand history sacred in name only. Voltaire found occasions to say more about the real nature of religion and its relation to manners and politics, priestcraft, and irrationality. He carried on a running critique of l’infâme in his squibs, satires, and biblical criticism, which circulated in manuscripts with even a bit being printed, and in his political pieces and other historical works. All that had contributed to Voltaire’s fame even though some of it was slapdash and not very good.18 Hume could see and envy the fame it brought Voltaire at the same time knowing such work could be better done. To write ecclesiastical history as Hume had seen it in The History of England would be to destroy the field in the interests of more enlightened ways of thinking.
Hume had already shown that the English church from the beginning was a political creation founded on the ambition of Pope Gregory, the fears of a pagan ruler in Kent who was “promised eternal joys above, and a kingdom in heaven without end,” and politic compromises about altars. Elsewhere, as in Wessex, it was introduced with violence and because of marriage agreements.19 Its benefits to the Saxons were very mixed:
Even Christianity, though it opened the way to connexions between them and the more polished states of Europe, had not hitherto been very effectual, in banishing their ignorance, or softening their barbarous manners. As they received that doctrine through the corrupted channels of Rome, it carried along with it a great mixture of credulity and superstition, equally destructive to the understanding and to morals. The reverence towards saints and reliques seems to have almost supplanted the adoration of the Supreme Being: Monastic observances were esteemed more meritorious than the active virtues: The knowledge of natural causes was neglected from the universal belief of miraculous interpositions and judgments: Bounty to the church atoned for every violence against society: And the remorses for cruelty, murder, treachery, assassination, and the more robust vices, were appeased, not by amendment of life, but by pennances, servility to the monks, and an abject and illiberal devotion. The reverence for the clergy had been carried to such a height, that, wherever a person appeared in a sacerdotal habit, though on the highway, the people flocked around him; and showing him all marks of profound respect, received every word he uttered as the most sacred oracle. Even the military virtues, so inherent in all the Saxon tribes, began to be neglected; and the nobility, preferring the security and sloth of the cloyster to the tumults and glory of war, valued themselves chiefly on endowing monasteries, of which they assumed the government. The several kings too, being extremely impoverished by continual benefactions to the church, to which the states of their kingdoms had weakly assented, could bestow no rewards on valour or military services, and retained not even sufficient influence to support their government.
Another inconvenience, which attended this corrupt species of Christianity, was the superstitious attachment to Rome, and the gradual subjection of the kingdom to a foreign jurisdiction. (H 1:50–51)
Writing an ecclesiastical history might give him lasting fame and more money and make some contribution to what he called at the end of his life “the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.”20 There were reasons enough to think about writing an ecclesiastical history.
IV
To fully appreciate the effects of what he contemplated one needs to see how ecclesiastical history functioned in Hume’s world—first in Scotland, then in Europe. It was important and had had a long career. Indeed, ancient historians such as Varro had separated sacred from secular history, the stories of the gods from those of heroes and the founders of states.21 Early Christians had coordinated the chronologies and histories of the Hebrews with those of other ancient peoples but had preserved the distinction between God’s chosen people and the gentile nations. For the Hebrews, there was both a religious and a secular history, particularly after the coronation of Saul. For the gentiles, there might be a providentially directed history, but they lacked inclusion in the Church, the community of the saved. By the second and third centuries A.D., Christians like Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263–339) were working out a chronology of world history and of the events in it that constituted the story of God’s provision for the salvation of some and then, with the death of Christ on the cross, the offer of salvation to all. That account had been made canonical by the work of Saint Augustine (354–430) and others. His scheme or variants of it were still in place by the 1750s; indeed, it formed the backdrop to the universal and ecclesiastical histories of men like Charles Rollin, Dom Calmet, Jacob Vernet (a Genevan pastor and Voltaire’s onetime friend), and many others including, however insincerely, the philosophe Turgot in his Sorbonniques of 1750. Hume, if he attacked those views, would not be tilting at windmills but would create for himself enemies and he certainly would have no peace.
Ecclesiastical history was very much an apologetic tool of the churches and sects. For Catholics, it established the primacy of their church and of the Bishop of Rome. It showed the continuity of revealed and traditional beliefs and their validation by miracles. Historians delineated the heresies of those who opposed both. It relied unquestioningly on a history derived from the Bible and the stories of the people of God as they were related in the writings of the saints and martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the records of Church councils and others made by ancient, medieval, and Reformation writers. For Protestants, it answered the old question “Where was your church before Luther?” Ecclesiastical history gave divinity students the learning to defend their faith while attacking the errors of others. This history was the history of a chosen people living in time but aware of a divine origin, a providential past, and a future containing judgments. Some would be damned, but others would be saved to spend a blissful eternity enjoying the presence of God. Ecclesiastical history showed the teleology imposed on all history by the Creator, who created and shaped our ends to His own unfathomable designs. It was providential and had causes and effects we can neither understand nor alter. Hume’s classical models for his own histories, Tacitus,22 Livy, Thucydides, and others, said nothing about those matters.
Hume’s first exposure to such traditional histories would have come in Scotland, where ecclesiastical history had always been taught in the divinity halls. University chairs were established fairly late and were posts that were not very lucrative and did not attract scholars of distinction. Like the study of Hebrew and oriental languages, ecclesiastical history did not flourish during the Scottish Enlightenment. Patrons used the chairs to place deserving men of little distinction, but the chairs were also of little concern to the moderates, who often determined the policies of the Kirk after the 1740s. Some of them were Hume’s friends and became in the 1750s members of the Moderate Party. They were among those who changed the nature of the courses.
The first lectureship in the field was held by “Blind [William] Jameson,” who in 1692 became a lecturer in civil and ecclesiastical history at Glasgow University.23 Jameson was a polemicist who excoriated the errors of the Roman Church but also of some Protestants. His sort of history required a knowledge of the ancient and modern churches since it was meant to prepare ministers to defend the Established Church of Scotland. An account of God’s providential actions in history was carried on into the present by Jameson’s friend Robert Wodrow, whose History of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution (1721–22) contained the story of God’s grace shed over a tested remnant who proved firm in their faith. Ecclesiastical history was the story
