It was Hume's interest in the nature of human knowing and believing and in the proper limits of human cognitive capacities which motivated his attention to the particular topics dealt with in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understandings; and Section x, ‘Of Miracles’, has its place in this wider project. Hume sees his argument about the credibility of reports of miracles primarily as undercutting those pretensions to knowledge about God which claim to derive from God's miracle-attested self-revelation. At the same time it prescribes limits to historical understanding, and C. S. Peirce can say ‘The whole of modern “higher criticism” of ancient history in general … is based upon the same logic as is used by Hume’. We shall shortly see that there are some more things to be said about the most respected historiography than those which Hume mentions; but we shall also see how thought about proper or ‘critical’ history has treated at least one aspect of Hume's appeal to experience as an essential and fundamental criterion of what historians may or may not affirm when confronted by the unusual or amazing.

In spite of Hume some Christian apologists such as Paley continued to account for miracle reports as having been prompted by miraculous events whose best or only explanation is theistic. Yet also, during the nineteenth century, there was more conspicuously a great flourishing of history-writing, careful and cautious in its claims, self-aware in its care.