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,
