How very clearly we find these principles practically illustrated in his History! A disinclination to believe in the narratives of great and remarkable deeds proceeding from peculiar impulses: a propensity, when the evidence adduced in their favour cannot be rebutted, to treat these peculiarities rather as diseases of the mind, than as the operation of noble aspirations: a levelling disposition to find all men pretty much upon a par, and none in a marked manner better or worse than their neighbours: an inclination to doubt all authorities which tended to prove that the British people had any fundamental liberties not possessed by the French and other European nations. Such are the practical fruits of this necessitarian philosophy. It was on this occasion that Hume promulgated those opinions upon miracles, which we have found him afraid to make public even in that work of which he afterwards regretted the bold and rash character. No part of his writings gave more offence to serious and devout thinkers; but the offence was in the manner of the promulgation, not the matter of the opinions. To understand how this occurred, let us cast a glance for a moment at two opposite classes of religious thinkers, into which a large portion of the Christian world is divided, and find with which, if with either, Hume's opinions coincide. If we suppose a man, impressed with a feeling of devotion and reverence for a Superior Being, who, seeing in the order of the world and all its movements, the omnipotent, all-wise, and all-merciful guidance of a divine Providence, believes that the Great Being will give to his creatures no revelation that is not in accordance with the merciful harmony of all his ways; and thus devoutly and submissively receives the word of God as promulgated in the Bible; attempts to make it the rule of his actions and opinions; receives with deference the views of those whom the same power that authorized it, has permitted to be the human instruments of its promulgation and explanation; tries to understand what it is within the power of his limited faculties to comprehend; but, implicitly believing that in the shadows of those mysteries which he is unable to penetrate, there lie operations as completely part of one great regular plan, as merciful, as beneficent, and as wise as the outward and comprehensible acts of Providence; who thus never for one moment allows his mind to doubt, where it is unable to comprehend or explain--such a man finds none of his sentiments in the writings of Hume, for he is at once told there that reason and revelation are two disconnected things, that each must act alone, and that the one derives no aid from the other.