He may have many, for aught I know; but let me observe to you there are vices of the mind as well as of the body; and I think a wickeder mind, and more obstinately bent on public mischief, I never knew.” The “establishing Atheism” was perhaps truer in a way than the Christian critic supposed; though nothing could be more distinct than Hume’s preliminary and repeated profession of Theism, and nothing more unscrupulous than Warburton’s statement.

The publisher being undeterred, other steps were taken. Of the reception of “The Natural History of Religion”, Hume says in “My Own Life”: “Its first entry was rather obscure, except only that Dr. Hurd wrote a pamphlet against it, with all the illiberal petulance, arrogance, and scurrility, which distinguish the Warburtonian school. This pamphlet gave me some consolation for the otherwise indifferent reception of my performance.” On this Hurd, with theological accuracy, writes: “He was much hurt, and no wonder, by so lively an attack upon him, and could not help confessing it in what he calls his ‘Own Life’ ”. The pamphlet was really in the main the work of Warburton, as we learn from Hurd, who, as Messrs. Green and Grose observe, “tells the narrative of the pious fraud with great simplicity”. Warburton had written certain characteristic observations on the margins of his copy of Hume, which Hurd thought worth printing; and the lion handed the copy over to his jackal, who, after slightly manipulating the material, published it anonymously as “Remarks on Mr. David Hume’s Essay on ‘The Natural History of Religion’: Addressed to the Rev. Dr. Warburton”. Hurd thought the “thin disguise” sufficed to take-in everybody, Hume included; but Hume actually wrote to his publisher soon after the issue: “I am positively assured that Dr. Warburton wrote that letter to himself, which you sent me; and indeed the style discovers him sufficiently”. He indicated a readiness to discuss the “principal topics of my philosophy” with Warburton; but thought the “Remarks” not worth answering; as they certainly were not. Warburton, of course, was incapable of efficient controversy with Hume on philosophical questions; and indeed it would be impossible to point to any Englishman of that period who was properly qualified for such a task. Butler had died in 1752; and, in the words of Buckle’s note-book, “in ecclesiastical literature the most prominent names were Warburton, the bully, and Hurd, the sneak”; which twain had, in the fashion above-noted, sought as was their wont “to labor together in a joint work to do a little good”, as Warburton phrased it. The “Remarks” on Hume’s work published in the following year by “S. T.” were more courteous than Warburton’s, but even less cogent.

To a rationalist reader to - day Hume’s “Natural History” is not more remarkable for its lucid analysis and downright criticism of the popular anthropomorphic religion of all ages, than for its singular adoption of a system which is only anthropomorphic with a difference. It is, in effect, a demonstration, on the lines of a now established anthropological theory, that all religion had its rise in the attempts of primeval man to explain natural phænomena by personified causes. Hume here, apparently without seeking to rest his assumption on any distinct theoretical basis, adopted the view of those ancients who, though in the dark as to cosmic history, held alike on traditional and on common-sense grounds that mankind had risen from a state of savagery. Cudworth, writing a hundred years before, brought immense learning to the work of showing that all the non-Christian religions exhibited a degeneration from the monotheistic truth originally revealed to men by the creator; the attempt being motived, of course, by the belief in creation and revelation with which Cudworth set out. Hume, despite his avowed Deism, must have given up the ordinary doctrine of the creation of man, whatever theory he may have held as to the creation of the world. He offers, however, no hypothesis as to the actual origin of human life; and his notion of the rise of religion would seem thus to rest on an unfixed conception of human beginnings, of which we cannot now even guess the details. It is now pretty clear that Butler’s main fulcrum with the thinkers of his day was the inveterate assumption that there must have been at some point of time a positive creation of men and animals. This habitual belief, as it were, tied men down to Deism; and it doubtless operated in the case of Hume. He, however, could never have been convinced by such an argument as Butler’s, which, resting the truth of an admittedly perplexing religion on the perplexity of the theistic system of nature, went as far to prove Mohammedanism as to prove Christianity. To say as does Professor Huxley, that “the solid sense of Butler left the Deism of the Freethinkers not a leg to stand upon”, is like arguing that if Darwinism could not be fully proved, Genesis must needs be true. Hume argued less rashly. What he appears to have done was to leave his conception of cosmic history in the vague, figuring men to himself as indeed somehow created, but first emerging in trustworthy history as “barbarous, necessitous animals”, who framed religious systems conformable to their poor capacities.

From this point, Hume’s argument is a process of acute deduction; that is to say, he sees that ignorant savages must have been polytheists, and goes on to show how, even after monotheism has been broached, ignorant minds—“the vulgar”, as the phrase then ran—will always reduce the “spiritual” notion to an anthropomorphic form, and monotheism to polytheism. Mr. Leslie Stephen has somewhat strangely argued, as against Buckle, that Hume’s argument is not deductive inasmuch as it asserts at the outset “the observed fact that monotheism is a recent growth”.