itter and almost malignant
sarcasm; reluctantly, and with exception and reservation, admits their
claim to admiration. This inextricable bias appears even to influence
his manner of composition. While all the other assailants of the Roman
empire, whether warlike or religious, the Goth, the Hun, the Arab, the
Tartar, Alaric and Attila, Mahomet, and Zengis, and Tamerlane, are each
introduced upon the scene almost with dramatic animation--their progress
related in a full, complete, and unbroken narrative--the triumph of
Christianity alone takes the form of a cold and critical disquisition.
The successes of barbarous energy and brute force call forth all the
consummate skill of composition; while the moral triumphs of Christian
benevolence--the tranquil heroism of endurance, the blameless purity,
the contempt of guilty fame and of honors destructive to the human race,
which, had they assumed the proud name of philosophy, would have been
blazoned in his brightest words, because they own religion as their
principle--sink into narrow asceticism. The glories of Christianity,
in short, touch on no chord in the heart of the writer; his imagination
remains unkindled; his words, though they maintain their stately and
measured march, have become cool, argumentative, and inanimate. Who
would obscure one hue of that gorgeous coloring in which Gibbon has
invested the dying forms of Paganism, or darken one paragraph in his
splendid view of the rise and progress of Mahometanism? But who
would not have wished that the same equal justice had been done to
Christianity; that its real character and deeply penetrating influence
had been traced with the same philosophical sagacity, and represented
with more sober, as would become its quiet course, and perhaps less
picturesque, but still with lively and attractive, descriptiveness? He
might have thrown aside, with the same scorn, the mass of ecclesiastical
fiction which envelops the early history of the church, stripped off
the legendary romance, and brought out the facts in their primitive
nakedness and simplicity--if he had but allowed those facts the benefit
of the glowing eloquence which he denied to them alone. He might have
annihilated the whole fabric of post-apostolic miracles, if he had left
uninjured by sarcastic insinuation those of the New Testament; he might
have cashiered, with Dodwell, the whole host of martyrs, which owe their
existence to the prodigal invention of later days, had