No one believed that the Deity created kings; many doubted whether there was a Deity at all. Since the great days of Athens, philosophy had seldom reaped a richer harvest than in Great Britain during the eighty years that followed the Act of Union. Newton’s _Principia_, and the philosophy of Shaftesbury, Clarke, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, as well as of Hume and Adam Smith, all fall within this period. Speculative discovery went hand in hand with mechanical invention. The poetry of enthusiasm, religious and political fervour, persecution, martyrdom, with all their heroic and squalid accompaniments, preceded and followed this prosaic illumination. It was a chapter of dry light between two of heat and fire and smoke. Reason reigned; and as reason seldom wears an air of originality, we need not wonder if later ingenuity has discovered that all these philosophers borrowed their doctrines either from the ancients or from one another or from foreigners. But though there appears to be just now a tendency to carry the search for the genealogy and pedigree of ideas rather too far, it is certainly not our purpose to show that Adam Smith was a solitary conqueror who founded a kingdom entirely for himself, and peopled it with the creatures of his imagination. Every great thinker holds the past in fee, as he levies a perpetual tribute on the future. We may see how in the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and in his lectures on Justice and Police Smith selected and used his materials; how, with the aid of Hutcheson and Mandeville and Hume, he invented a new doctrine of sympathy, and how he worked up the Platonic idea of the division of labour, and the Aristotelian theory of money, into a true science of national wealth. Nothing is left of the first part of the lectures, which dealt (briefly, no doubt) with natural theology and, in the earliest years of his professorship, very fully with moral philosophy. His pupil and friend Millar says that under the head of Natural Theology, the first part of his course, Smith considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded.