Hume, for example, ignored the following response by James Beattie to his attacks on religion. People like Hume, Beattie wrote, should remember that “in the solitary scenes of life, there is many an honest and tender heart pining with incurable anguish, pierced with the sharpest sting of disappointment, bereft of friends, chilled with poverty, racked with disease, scourged by the oppressor; whom nothing but trust in Providence, and the hope of a future retribution, could preserve from the agonies of despair. And do they [the Enlightened], with sacrilegious hands, attempt to violate the last refuge of the miserable, and to rob them of the only comfort that had survived the ravages of misfortunate, malice, and tyranny!”
– David Stove, Cricket versus Republicanism, 1995