It has been alleged that Pope’s verse is but another rendering of Bolingbroke’s views without his “aristocratic nonchalance,” and that some passages of Pope regarded as hostile to revealed religion, were specially due to the influence of Bolingbroke; and more than one critic has professed to trace identities of thought and expression in order to show that Pope was largely indebted to the published works of St. John. David Hume was born at Edinburgh, 26th April, 1711, and died 1776. He created a new school of Freethinkers, and is to-day one of the most esteemed amongst sceptical authors. He was a profound thinker, and an easy, elegant writer, who did much to give a force and solidity to extreme heretical reasonings, which they had hitherto been regarded as lacking. His heretical essays have had a far wider circulation since his death than they enjoyed during his life. Many volumes have been issued in the fruitless endeavor to refute him, and all these have contributed to widen the circle of his readers. He adopted and advocated the utilitarian and necessitarian theory of morals, and wrote of ordinary theism and religion as arising from personification of unknown causes for general or special phenomena. He held and advanced the idea, which Buckle so fully states, and endeavors to prove in his “History of Civilisation”—viz., that general laws operate amongst peoples, and influence and determine their so-called moral conduct, much as other laws do the orbits of planets, the occurrences of eclipses, etc. His arguments against miracles, as evidences for revealed religion, remain unrefuted, although they have been made the subject of many attacks. He contends, in effect, that in each account of a miraculous occurrence there is always more _prima facie_ probability of error, or bad faith on the part of the narrator, than of interference with those invariable sequences known as natural laws, and there was really no reply in the conclusion of Dr. Campbell, to the effect that we have equally to trust human testimony for an account of the laws of nature and for the narratives of miracles, for in truth you never have the same character of human testimony for the latter as for the former. And, further, while in the case of human testimony as to natural events, it is evidence which you may test and compare with your own experience. This is not so as to miracles, declared at once to be out of the range of all ordinary experience. “Men,” he says, “are carried by a natural instinct or prepossession to repose faith in their senses. When they follow this blind and powerful instinct of nature, they always suppose the very images presented to the senses to be the external objects, and never entertain any suspicion that the one are nothing but representatives of the other. But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception.