rift afterwards into the opposite extreme of scepticism. He
did not become an atheist, like some of the French writers whom we have
been studying: but he seems to have given up the belief in the divine
origin of Christianity; and he manifested the spirit of dislike and
insinuation common in the unbelief of the time.

He did not write expressly against Christianity; but the subject came
across his path in travelling over the vast space of time which he
embraced in his magnificent History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. It is a subject of regret to be compelled to direct hostile
remarks against one who has deserved so well of the world. That work,
though in the pageantry of its style(622) it in some sense reflects the
art and taste of the age in which it was written, yet in its love of solid
information and deep research is the noblest work of history in the
English tongue. Grand alike in its subject, its composition, and its
perspective, it has a right to a place among the highest works of human
conception; and sustains the relation to history which the works of
Michael Angelo bear to art. In the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of
this work, Gibbon had occasion to discuss the origin of Christianity, and
assigned five causes for its spread; viz. its internal doctrine, and
organization, miracles, Jewish zeal, and excellence of Christian morals.
The chapters were received with denunciations. Yet those(623) who in later
times have re-examined Gibbon's statements candidly admit that they can
find hardly any errors of fact or intentional mis-statement of
circumstances.

The great mistake which he commits is obvious, and the cause hardly less
so. The mistake is twofold: first, he attributes to the earliest period of
Christianity that which was only true of a later; and secondly, he
confounds the circumstances of the spread of Christianity with the cause
which gave it force.(624) The powerful influence of the causes which he
specifies cannot be doubted;(625) and we may hold it to be not derogatory
to our religion that it admits of union with every class of efficient
causes; and adapts itself so fully to man's wants, as to accept the
support of ordinary sources of influence. But the causes which he alleges
operated far less strongly, and some of them not at all, in the primitive
age of Christianity. The discussion of this period lay beyond Gibbon's
purpose; and as he dwelt wholly on the aspects of a later age, he ha