rought out the failings and the follies of the succeeding
ages, that a shadow of doubt and suspicion was thrown back upon the
primitive period of Christianity.

"The theologian," says Gibbon, "may indulge the pleasing task of
describing religion as she descended from heaven, arrayed in her native
purity; a more melancholy duty is imposed upon the historian:--he
must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she
contracted in a long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate
race of beings." Divest this passage of the latent sarcasm betrayed by
the subsequent tone of the whole disquisition, and it might commence a
Christian history written in the most Christian spirit of candor. But as
the historian, by seeming to respect, yet by dexterously confounding the
limits of the sacred land, contrived to insinuate that it was an Utopia
which had no existence but in the imagination of the theologian--as he
suggested rather than affirmed that the days of Christian purity were a
kind of poetic golden age;--so the theologian, by venturing too far into
the domain of the historian, has been perpetually obliged to contest
points on which he had little chance of victory--to deny facts
established on unshaken evidence--and thence, to retire, if not with
the shame of defeat, yet with but doubtful and imperfect success. Paley,
with his intuitive sagacity, saw through the difficulty of answering
Gibbon by the ordinary arts of controversy; his emphatic sentence,
"Who can refute a sneer?" contains as much truth as point. But full and
pregnant as this phrase is, it is not quite the whole truth; it is the
tone in which the progress of Christianity is traced, in comparison with
the rest of the splendid and prodigally ornamented work, which is the
radical defect in the "Decline and Fall." Christianity alone receives
no embellishment from the magic of Gibbon's language; his imagination is
dead to its moral dignity; it is kept down by a general zone of jealous
disparagement, or neutralized by a painfully elaborate exposition of
its darker and degenerate periods. There are occasions, indeed, when its
pure and exalted humanity, when its manifestly beneficial influence,
can compel even him, as it were, to fairness, and kindle his unguarded
eloquence to its usual fervor; but, in general, he soon relapses into a
frigid apathy; affects an ostentatiously severe impartiality; notes all
the faults of Christians in every age with b