David Hume used these words to describe those portions of the world that had not been touched by the Enlightenment in his time. In The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, Peter Gay claims that this rejection of religion and superstition was necessary to give the philosophes the freedom to criticize the past — especially the Christian role in the development of Western culture. He writes that “scholars could see the Christian millennium fairly only after polemicists had freed themselves from it by seeing it unfairly.” What Gay fails to note is that his history of the Enlightenment is written within the intellectual context that was created by Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire and others. If the rejection of Christian presuppositions was necessary for the development of a true critique of the past, it seems to follow that a questioning of the foundations of a modern, rational worldview are needed for Gay's task.