A more credible explanation must be looked for, and it can only be discovered in the intense odium theologicum which the name of Hume excited at the moment, and which made it imperative, if the new Review was to get justice, that it should be severed from all association with his detested name.  Scotland happened to be at that very hour in an exceptional ferment about his theological heresies, and one of the strangest of proposals had come before the previous General Assembly of the Kirk, backed by a number of the most respected country clergy.  It was no other than to summon the great sceptic to their bar, to visit his Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals with censure, and to pronounce against the author the major ban of excommunication.

The wise heads who rule the Scotch Church courts of course threw out this inconvenient proposal by the favourite ecclesiastical device of passing an abstract resolution expressive of concern at the growing evils of the day, without committing the Church to any embarrassing practical action; and Hume himself was, as Wedderburn told them he likely would be, hardened enough to laugh at the very idea of their anathema.  But the originators of the agitation only returned to the battle, and prepared for a victory in the next Assembly in May 1756.  Between the two Assemblies Hume wrote his friend Allan Ramsay, the painter, who was in Rome:  “You may tell that reverend gentleman the Pope that there are men here who rail at him, and yet would be much greater persecutors had they equal power.  The last Assembly sat on me.  They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot, but they intended to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing.  My friends, however, prevailed, and my damnation is postponed for a twelvemonth, but next Assembly will surely be upon me."[93] And so in truth it was.  An overture came up calling for action regarding “one person calling himself David Hume, Esq., who hath arrived at such a degree of boldness as publicly to avow himself the author of books containing the most rude and open attacks upon the glorious Gospel of Christ,” and a motion was made for the appointment of a committee “to inquire into the writings of this author, to call him before them, and prepare the matter for the next General Assembly.”  This motion was again defeated, and the heresy-hunters passed on to turn their attention to Lord Kames, and to summon the printers and publishers of his Essays before the Edinburgh Presbytery to give up the author’s name (the book having been published anonymously), “that he and they may be censured according to the law of the Gospel and the practice of this and all other well-governed churches.”

It is open to us to believe that Hume’s friends contemplated no more than a temporary exclusion of him from their counsels until this storm should pass by; but at any rate, as they launched their frail bark in the very thick of the storm, it would have meant instant swamping at that juncture to have taken the Jonah who caused all the commotion and made him one of their crew.  For the same reason, when they found that, for all their precautions, the clamour overtook them notwithstanding, they simply put back into port and never risked so unreasoning and raging an element again.