hinking and reasoning
will surely not be pronounced inferior to those of any, even of the
most distinguished champions of the Unitarian school, and whose
theological opinions cannot be charged with any supposed taint from
professional habits or interests. A layman (and he too a familiar
friend of David Hume), whose life was employed in scientific,
political, and philosophical researches, has given to the world those
sentiments as the natural suggestions of reason. Yet these are the
sentiments which are the scoff of sciolists and witlings."[361]

The sciolists and witlings were not slow in returning the scoff, and
pointing out that while Smith was, no doubt, as an intellectual
authority all that the Archbishop claimed for him, his authority
really ran against the Archbishop's view and not in favour of it,
inasmuch as he had withdrawn the passage relied on from the last
edition of his work. Dr. Magee instantly changed his tune, and without
thinking whether he had any ground for the statement, attributed the
omission to the unhappy influence over Smith's mind of the aggressive
infidelity of Hume. "It adds one proof more," says his Grace, who,
having failed to make Smith an evidence for Christianity, will now
have him turned into a warning against unbelief,--"it adds one proof
more to the many that already existed of the danger, even to the most
enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity." His intercourse
with Hume was at its closest when he first published the passage in
1759, whereas Hume was fourteen years in his grave when the passage
was omitted; besides there is probably as much left in the context
which Hume would object to as is deleted, and in any case, there is no
reason to believe that Smith's opinion about the atonement was anywise
different in 1790 from what it was in 1759, or for doubting his own
explanation of the omission, which he is said to have given to certain
Edinburgh friends, that he thought the passage unnecessary and
misplaced.[362] As if taking an odd revenge for its suppression, the
original manuscript of this particular passage seems to have
reappeared from between the leaves of a volume of Aristotle in the
year 1831, when all the rest of the MS. of the book and of Smith's
other works had long gone to destruction.[363] It may be added, as so
much attention has been paid to Smith's religious opinions, that he
gives a fresh expression to his belief in a future state and an
all-seeing Jud