e years during which his biographer is able to follow
him with the least certainty. Hardly any of his letters which refer to
that period have been preserved, and he has glided rapidly over it in
his Memoirs. Yet it was, in other respects besides the matter of
pecuniary troubles, a momentous epoch in his life. The peculiar views
which he adopted and partly professed on religion must have been
formed then. But the date, the circumstance, and the occasion are left
in darkness. Up to December 18, 1763, Gibbon was evidently a believer.
In an entry in his private journal under that date he speaks of a
Communion Sunday at Lausanne as affording an "edifying spectacle," on
the ground that there is "neither business nor parties, and they
interdict even whist" on that day. How soon after this his opinions
began to change, it is impossible to say. But we are conscious of a
markedly different tone in the _Observations_, and a sneer at "the
ancient alliance between the avarice of the priests and the credulity
of the people" is in the familiar style of the Deists from Toland to
Chubb. There is no evidence of his familiarity with the widely
diffused works of the freethinkers, and as far as I am aware he does
not quote or refer to them even once. But they could hardly have
escaped his notice. Still his strong historic sense and solid
erudition would be more likely to be repelled than attracted by their
vague and inaccurate scholarship, and chimerical theories of the light
of Nature. Still we know that he practically adopted, in the end, at
least the negative portion of these views, and the question is, When
did he do so? His visit to Paris, and the company that he frequented
there, might suggest that as a probable date of his change of
opinions. But the entry just referred to was subsequent by several
months to that visit, and we may with confidence assume that no
freethinker of the eighteenth century would pronounce the austerities
of a Communion Sunday in a Calvinist town an edifying spectacle. It is
probable that his relinquishing of dogmatic faith was gradual, and for
a time unconscious. It was an age of tepid belief, except among the
Nonjurors and Methodists; and with neither of these groups could he
have had the least sympathy. His acquaintance with Hume, and his
partiality for the writings of Bayle, are more probable sources of a
change of sentiment which was in a way predestined by natural bias and
cast of mind. Any occasion woul