is too
short to fathom the immense abyss' which we have now reached. But we
need not, therefore, follow Hume to the lengths to which his insidious
mock-modesty would fain entice us. We may concede to him that 'we have
no idea of a Supreme Being but what we learn from reflection on our own
faculties,' but we need not imitate him by perversely shutting our eyes
to the evidences of an energy inherent in our own faculties, and thereby
entitle him to insist on our joining him in denying that there is any
evidence of energy in the Supreme Being. We need not, because
constrained to admit that we know no more of the essence of divine, than
we do of human, power, pretend that we cannot even conceive such a thing
as divine power. Hume's affectation of profound ignorance on the subject
must have occasioned unusual amusement in a certain quarter. The Devil
can seldom have had a more hearty grin at his darling sin than when
witnessing this peculiar exhibition of the pride that apes humility.

That Hume's ignorance was nothing but affectation is proved by his
veering completely round immediately afterwards, and in his very next
chapter, and almost in his very next page, pronouncing it to be
'universally allowed that matter in all its operations is actuated by a
necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely
determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect in such
particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it.'
Throughout the same chapter he argues in the same sense, and quite
forgetting how obstinately he had just before contended that there are
absolutely no such things as connection or power at all, he defies any
one to 'define a cause without comprehending, as part of the definition,
_necessary_ connection with its effect.' So highly, indeed, does he now
rate that connecting power, whose very existence he had previously so
vehemently denied, that he professes himself unable to set any limit to
its efficacy. Even for those who should undertake to deduce from it the
impossibility of any liberty of human will, and consequently of any
human responsibility, pleading that, inasmuch as with a continued chain
of necessary causes, reaching from the first great cause of all to every
separate volition of every single human creature, it must needs be the
Creator of the world who is the ultimate author of all volitions, and
consequently solely accountable for every crime which man commits, he
affects,