The letter to Strahan, on the other hand, excited a long reverberation of angry criticism.  Smith had certainly in writing it no thought of undermining the faith, or of anything more than speaking a good word for the friend he loved, and putting on record some things which he considered very remarkable when he observed them, but in the ear of that age his simple words rang like a challenge to religion itself.  Men had always heard that without religion they could neither live a virtuous life nor die an untroubled death, and yet here was the foremost foe of Christianity represented as leading more than the life of the just, and meeting death not only without perturbation, but with a positive gaiety of spirits.  His cheerfulness without frivolity, his firmness, his magnanimity, his charity, his generosity, his entire freedom from malice, his intellectual elevation and strenuous labour, are all described with the affection and confidence of a friend who had known them well; and they are finally summed up in the conclusion:  “Upon the whole I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”

Hume’s character was certainly one of great beauty and nobleness, and churchmen who knew him well speak of him in quite as strong admiration as Smith.  Robertson used to call him “the virtuous heathen”; Blair said every word Smith wrote about him was true; and Lord Hailes, a grave religious man and a public apologist of Christianity, showed sufficient approbation of this letter to translate it into Latin verse.  But in the world generally it raised a great outcry.  It was false, it was incredible, it was a wicked defiance of the surest verities of religion.  Even Boswell calls it a piece of “daring effrontery,” and as he thinks of it being done by his old professor, says, “Surely now have I more understanding than my teachers.”  Though nothing was further from the intention of the author, it was generally regarded as an attack upon religion, which imperatively called for repulsion; and a champion soon appeared in the person of Dr. George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, author of a well-known commentary on the Psalms, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich.  In an anonymous pamphlet, entitled “A Letter to Adam Smith, LL.D., on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of David Hume, Esq., by one of the People called Christians,” which ran rapidly through a number of editions, Horne, begging the whole question he raises, contends that a man of Hume’s known opinions could not by any possibility be the good and virtuous man Smith represented him to be, for had he been really generous, or compassionate, or good-natured, or charitable, or gentle-minded, he could never have thought of erasing from the hearts of mankind the knowledge of God and the comfortable faith in His fatherly care, or been guilty of “the atrocious wickedness of diffusing