The arch politician contrived to make his theological criticism colourless even to the point of vapidity, but that did not save him or his Review; it perhaps only exposed them the more to the attacks of zealots.  His notice of the sermons of Ebenezer Erskine, the Secession leader, provoked a sharp pamphlet from Erskine’s son, in which the reviewers were accused of teaching unsound theological views, of putting the creature before the Creator by allowing the lawfulness of a lie in certain situations, of throwing ridicule on the Bible and the Westminster Confession of Faith, and of having David Hume, an atheist, among their number.

This last thrust was a mere controversial guess, and, strangely enough, it guessed wrong.  A new literary review is started in Edinburgh by a few of Hume’s younger friends, and Hume himself—­the only one of them who had yet made any name in literature, and the most distinguished man of letters then in Scotland—­is neither asked to contribute to the periodical, nor even admitted to the secret of its origination.  When the first number appeared he went about among his acquaintances expressing the greatest surprise that so promising a literary adventure should be started by Edinburgh men of letters without a whisper of it ever reaching his ears.  More than that, his very name and writings were strangely and studiously ignored in its pages.  His History of the Stewarts was one of the last new books, having been published in the end of 1754, and was unquestionably much the most important work that had recently come from any Scotch pen, yet in a periodical instituted for the very purpose of devoting attention to the productions of Scotch authors, this work of his remained absolutely unnoticed.

Why this complete boycott of Hume by his own household?  Henry Mackenzie “thinks he has heard” two reasons given for it:  first, that Hume was considered too good-natured for a critic, and certain to have insisted on softening remarks his colleagues believed to be called for; and second, that they determined to keep him out of the secret entirely, because he could not keep a secret.[92] But this explanation does not hold together.  If Hume was so good-natured, he would be less difficult rather than more difficult to manage; and as for not being able to keep a secret, that, as Mr. Burton observes, is a very singular judgment to pass on one who had been Secretary of Legation already and was soon to be Secretary of Legation again, and Under Secretary of State, without having been once under the shadow of such an accusation.  Besides, neither of these reasons will explain the ignoring of his writings.