human
; while the lectures on Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the chair, were said to lead
gpt
to hold that
human
[847] Smith was thus well founded in rationalism before he became personally acquainted with Voltaire and the other French freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who deplores his associations avows that neither before nor after his French tour was his religious creed ever
gpt
[848] It is clear, however, that it steadily developed in a rationalistic direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the prevailing vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but even there there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state, and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it. [849] In the sixth edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he deleted the passage which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement to be in harmony with natural ethics. [850] But most noteworthy of all is his handling of the question of religious establishments in the Wealth of Nations. [851] It is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon's fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith's general popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of