opinions could not by any possibility be the good and
virtuous man Smith represented him to be, for had he been really
generous, or compassionate, or good-natured, or charitable, or
gentle-minded, he could never have thought of erasing from the hearts
of mankind the knowledge of God and the comfortable faith in His
fatherly care, or been guilty of "the atrocious wickedness of
diffusing atheism through the land." Horne goes on to charge this
"atrocious wickedness" against Smith too. "You would persuade us," he
says, "by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only
cordial for low spirits and the proper antidote against the fear of
death, but surely he who can reflect with complacency on a friend thus
employing his talents in this life, and thus amusing himself with
Lucian, whist, and Charon at his death, can smile over Babylon in
ruins, esteem the earthquakes which destroyed Lisbon as agreeable
occurrences, and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in
the Red Sea."

Smith never wrote any reply to this attack, nor took any public notice
of it whatever, though he had too much real human nature in him to
agree with Bishop Horne's own ethereal maxim that "a man reproached
with a crime of which he knows himself to be innocent should feel no
more uneasiness than if he was said to be ill when he felt himself in
perfect health." It was of course quite unjust to accuse Smith of
atheism, or of desiring to propagate atheism. His published writings,
which the Bishop ought in fairness to have consulted, show him to have
been a Theist, and there is some ground for thinking that he believed
Hume, as many others of Hume's personal friends did, to have been a
Theist likewise. Though Hume was philosophically a doubter about
matter, about his own existence, about God, he did not practically
think so differently from the rest of the world about any of the three
as was often supposed. Dr. Carlyle always thought him a believer. Miss
Mure of Caldwell, the sister of his great friend the Baron of
Exchequer, says he was the most superstitious man she ever knew.[272]
He told Holbach that an atheist never existed, and once, while walking
with Adam Ferguson on a beautiful clear night, he stopped suddenly and
exclaimed, pointing to the sky, "Can any one contemplate the wonders
of that firmament and not believe that there is a God?"[273] That
Smith would not have been surprised to hear his friend make such a
confession is a