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Notes given to William Cleghorn, after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint
Hume because he was seen as an atheist.
During the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Hume tutored the Marquis of Annandale (1720–92), who was
officially described as a “lunatic”.This engagement ended in disarray after about a year. But it was
then that Hume started his great historical work The History of England, which took fifteen years
and ran over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period between 1754 and 1762,
while also involved with the Canongate Theatre. In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo
and other Scottish Enlightenment luminaries in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three
years as secretary to Lieutenant-General St Clair, and wrote Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Understanding, later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry proved
little more successful than the Treatise.
Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends, who argued
that—as an atheist—he was outside the Church’s jurisdiction. Despite his acquittal, Hume failed
to gain the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
It was after returning to Edinburgh in 1752, as he wrote in My Own Life, that “the Faculty of
Advocates chose me their Librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but
which gave me the command of a large library”.This resource enabled him to continue historical
research for The History of England.
Hume achieved great literary fame as a historian. His enormous The History of England, tracing
events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, was a best-seller in its day. In
it, Hume presented political person as a creature of habit, with a disposition to submit quietly to
established government unless confronted by uncertain circumstances. In his view, only religious
difference could deflect people from their everyday lives to think about political matters.
Hume’s volume of Political Discourses (published by Kincaid & Donaldson, 1752) was the only
work he considered successful on first publication.
Religion
Tomb of David Hume in Edinburgh Hume wrote a great deal on religion. The question of what
were Hume’s personal views on religion is a difficult one. The Church of Scotland seriously
considered bringing charges of infidelity against him.
In works such as On Superstition and Enthusiasm, Hume specifically seems to support the standard
religious views of his time and place. This still meant that he could be very critical of the Catholic
Church, referring to it with the standard Protestant epithets and descriptions of it as superstition
and idolatry as well as dismissing what his compatriots saw as uncivilised beliefs. He also
considered extreme Protestant sects, which he called enthusiasts, to be corrupters of religion.Yet he
also put forward arguments that suggested that polytheism had much to commend it in preference
to monotheism.
It is likely that Hume was sceptical both about religious belief (at least as demanded by the
religious organisations of his time) and of the complete atheism promoted by such contemporaries
as Baron d’Holbach. Paul Russell suggests that perhaps Hume’s position is best characterised by
the term “irreligion”. O’Connor (2001, p19) writes that Hume “did not believe in the God of
standard theism. ... but he did not rule out all concepts of deity”. Also, “ambiguity suited his
purposes, and this creates difficulty in definitively pinning down his final position on religion”.
When asked if he was an atheist, Hume would say he did not have enough faith to believe there
was no god.
The perception of Hume as an atheist with an axe to grind is an oversimplification and contrasts
his views on extremist positioning. Hanvelt dubs Hume as an Aristotelian in his view that rhetoric
is a form of ethical studies, which ultimately make it political.
Later Years
From 1763 to 1765, Hume was secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris. He met and later fell out with
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote of his Paris life, “I really wish often for the plain roughness of

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