Includes the short "autobiography" of Hume (1711-1776). After his early publications "fell deadborn from the press", the clerics began railing against other skeptics and free thinkers, and eventually found Hume's republications. He owes his eventual success to their efforts to attack him, to which he never replied. Indeed, the notoriety gave him much encouragement, and "I was ever more disposed to see the favorable than unfavorable side of things--a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year".[6]

Hume writes his last, stricken by a mortal disease of the bowel, cheerful to the end: "In a word, though most men anywise eminent have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched or even attacked by her baleful tooth; and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury".

A private fraud or cruelty is the equivalent of the tyranny of a dictator. [58]

Of Miracles and Religion: "Upon the whole, we may conclude that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity. And whoever is moved by faith to assent to it is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person which subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience." [141]