faith, or of anything more than speaking a good word
for the friend he loved, and putting on record some things which he
considered very remarkable when he observed them, but in the ear of
that age his simple words rang like a challenge to religion itself.
Men had always heard that without religion they could neither live a
virtuous life nor die an untroubled death, and yet here was the
foremost foe of Christianity represented as leading more than the life
of the just, and meeting death not only without perturbation, but with
a positive gaiety of spirits. His cheerfulness without frivolity, his
firmness, his magnanimity, his charity, his generosity, his entire
freedom from malice, his intellectual elevation and strenuous labour,
are all described with the affection and confidence of a friend who
had known them well; and they are finally summed up in the conclusion:
"Upon the whole I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and
since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly
wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will
permit."

Hume's character was certainly one of great beauty and nobleness, and
churchmen who knew him well speak of him in quite as strong admiration
as Smith. Robertson used to call him "the virtuous heathen"; Blair
said every word Smith wrote about him was true; and Lord Hailes, a
grave religious man and a public apologist of Christianity, showed
sufficient approbation of this letter to translate it into Latin
verse. But in the world generally it raised a great outcry. It was
false, it was incredible, it was a wicked defiance of the surest
verities of religion. Even Boswell calls it a piece of "daring
effrontery," and as he thinks of it being done by his old professor,
says, "Surely now have I more understanding than my teachers." Though
nothing was further from the intention of the author, it was generally
regarded as an attack upon religion, which imperatively called for
repulsion; and a champion soon appeared in the person of Dr. George
Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, author of a well-known
commentary on the Psalms, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich. In an
anonymous pamphlet, entitled "A Letter to Adam Smith, LL.D., on the
Life, Death, and Philosophy of David Hume, Esq., by one of the People
called Christians," which ran rapidly through a number of editions,
Horne, begging the whole question he raises, contends that a man of
Hume's known