eenth
century. Without the work of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and their
fellow-combatants, would it have been reformed? "The Christian Churches"
(I quote Lord Morley) "are assimilating as rapidly as their formulae
will permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the
higher spirituality of

[160] teachers who have abandoned all churches and who are
systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men."

In England the prevalent deistic thought did not lead to the same
intellectual consequences as in France; yet Hume, the greatest English
philosopher of the century, showed that the arguments commonly adduced
for a personal God were untenable. I may first speak of his discussion
on miracles in his Essay on Miracles and in his philosophical Inquiry
concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hitherto the credibility of
miracles had not been submitted to a general examination independent of
theological assumptions. Hume, pointing out that there must be a uniform
experience against every miraculous event (otherwise it would not merit
the name of miracle), and that it will require stronger testimony to
establish a miracle than an event which is not contrary to experience,
lays down the general maxim that "no testimony is sufficient to
establish a miracle unless the testimony is of such a kind that its
falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to
establish." But, as a matter of fact, no testimony exists of which the
falsehood would be a prodigy. We cannot find in history any miracle
attested by a sufficient number of men of such unquestionable good

[161] sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all
delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity as to place them
beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit in
the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their
being detected in any falsehood, and at the same time attesting facts
performed in such a public manner as to render detection unavoidable
--all which circumstances are requisite to give us a full assurance in
the testimony of men.

In the Dialogues on Natural Religion which were not published till after
his death (1776), Hume made an attack on the "argument from design," on
which deists and Christians alike relied to prove the existence of a
Deity. The argument is that the world presents clear marks of design,
endless adaptation of means to ends, which can only be