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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 he but bestowed fair room,
and dwelt with his ordinary energy on the sufferings of the genuine
witnesses to the truth of Christianity, the Polycarps, or the martyrs of
Vienne.

And indeed, if, after all, the view of the early progress of
Christianity be melancholy and humiliating we must beware lest we charge
the whole of this on the infidelity of the historian. It is idle, it
is disingenuous, to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of
Christianity, its gradual but rapid departure from its primitive
simplicity and purity, still more, from its spirit of universal love.
It may be no unsalutary lesson to the Christian world, that this silent,
this unavoidable, perhaps, yet fatal change shall have been drawn by an
impartial, or even an hostile hand. The Christianity of every age may
take warning, lest by its own narrow views, its want of wisdom, and its
want of charity, it give the same advantage to the future unfriendly
historian, and disparage the cause of true religion.

The design of the present edition is partly c