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.

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 c