  Prior soon retreated from this leap toward unbelief. According to his military record, he was a ‘Presby’ (Presbyterian) again by about 1944. But although his scepticism born of psychoanalysis had weakened, it seems this was eventually replaced by philosophical scepticism of a more ordinary sort. The New Zealand philosopher Jim Thornton, who was Prior’s student during the period 1949–1953, recollected that ‘at the time when I was one of his senior students I got the impression that he thought Hume’s scepticism on religious belief was impressive’. Thornton continued ‘He enjoyed drawing our attention to Hume’s irony in various passages in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and also in the closing paragraph of the essay Of Miracles’: