These pretended religionists are really a kind of
superstitious atheists, and acknowledge no being that corresponds
to our idea of a Deity. No first principle of mind or thought; no
supreme government and administration; no divine contrivance or
intention in the fabric of the world."--(IV. pp. 450-51.)
The doctrine that you may call an atheist anybody whose ideas about the
Deity do not correspond with your own, is so largely acted upon by
persons who are certainly not of Hume's way of thinking and, probably,
so far from having read him, would shudder to open any book bearing his
name, except the _History of England_, that it is surprising to trace
the theory of their practice to such a source.
But on thinking the matter over, this theory seems so consonant with
reason, that one feels ashamed of having suspected many excellent
persons of being moved by mere malice and viciousness of temper to call
other folks atheists, when, after all, they have been obeying a purely
intellectual sense of fitness. As Hume says, truly enough, it is a mere
fallacy, because two people use the same names for things, the ideas of
which are mutually exclusive, to rank such opposite opinions under the
same denomination. If the Jew says, that the Deity is absolute unity,
and that it is sheer blasphemy to say that He ever became incarnate in
the person of a man; and, if the Trinitarian says, that the Deity is
numerically three as well as numerically one, and that it is sheer
blasphemy to say that He did not so become incarnate, it is obvious
enough that each must be logically held to deny the existence of the
other's Deity.
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