It may indeed be thought that they declined Hume’s co-operation, because they expressly hoisted the flag of religion in their preface, and professed one of their objects to be to resist the current attacks of infidelity.  But there would have been no inconsistency in engaging the co-operation of an unbeliever on secular subjects, so long as they retained the rudder in their own hands, and men who were already Hume’s intimate personal friends were not likely to be troubled with such unnecessary scruples about their consistency.  The true reason both of Hume’s exclusion from their secret and of their own abandonment of their undertaking is undoubtedly the reason given by Lord Woodhouselee, that they wanted to live and work in peace.  They did not like, to use a phrase of Hamilton of Bangour, to have “zeal clanking her iron bands” about their ears.  Hume, on the other hand, rather took pleasure in the din he provoked, and had he been a contributor the rest would have had difficulty—­and may have felt so—­in restraining him from gratifying that taste when any favourable opportunities offered.

While these things were going on in Edinburgh a book had made its appearance from the London press, which is often stated to have been written for the express purpose of converting Adam Smith to a belief in the miraculous evidences of Christianity.  That book is the Criterion of Miracles Examined, by Smith’s Oxford friend Bishop Douglas, then a country rector in Shropshire.  It is written in the form of a letter to an anonymous correspondent, who had, in spite of his “good sense, candour, and learning,” and on grounds “many of them peculiar to himself and not borrowed from books,” “reasoned himself into an unfavourable opinion of the evidences of Christianity”; and this anonymous correspondent is said in Chalmers’s Biographical Dictionary to have been “since known to be Adam Smith.”  From Chalmers’s Dictionary the same statement has been repeated in the same words in subsequent biographical dictionaries and elsewhere, but neither Chalmers nor his successors reveal who it was to whom this was known, or how he came to know it; and on the other hand, Macdonald, the son-in-law and biographer of Douglas, makes no mention of Smith’s name in connection with this work at all, and explicitly states that the book was written for the satisfaction of more than one of the author’s friends, who had been influenced by the objections of Hume and others to the reality of the Gospel miracles.[94] This leaves the point somewhat undetermined.

Smith was certainly a Theist, his writings leave no doubt of that, but he most probably discarded the Christian miracles; and if Douglas’s book is addressed to his particular position, discarded them on the ground that there is no possible criterion for distinguishing true miracles from false, and enabling you to accept those of Christianity if you reject those of profane history.  The Earl of Buchan,