Laudator Temporis Acti

Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 80, with note on p. 276 ("the subject" = "divergences on religious matters"; "Blair" = "Hugh Blair"):

A few years later Hume broached the subject with Blair, the minister of the biggest and most prestigious church in Scotland, St. Giles' Cathedral. "Whenever I have had the pleasure to be in your company," he writes, "if the discourse turned upon any common subject of literature or reasoning, I always parted from you both entertained and instructed. But when the conversation was diverted by you from this channel towards the subject of your profession; tho I doubt not but your intentions were very friendly towards me, I own I never received the same satisfaction: I was apt to be tired, and you to be angry." Hume thus offers a proposal: "I would therefore wish for the future, wherever my good fortune throws me in your way, that these topics should be forborne between us. I have, long since, done with all inquiries on such subjects, and am become incapable of instruction."⁴⁰

40. David Hume to Hugh Blair, autumn 1761?, in HL I, 351.

HL I = The Letters of David Hume. Edited by J.Y.T. Greig, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932).