rded with too much honour. It unquestionably shows the early and
trenchant force of his intellect: he mastered the logical position in
a moment; saw the necessity of a criterion of faith; and being told
that it was to be found in the practice of antiquity, boldly went
there, and abided by the result. But this praise to his head does not
extend to his heart. A more tender and deep moral nature would not
have moved so rapidly. We must in fairness remember that it was not
his fault that his religious education had been neglected at home, at
school, and at college. But we have no reason to think that had it
been attended to, the result would have been much otherwise. The root
of spiritual life did not exist in him. It never withered, because it
never shot up. Thus when he applied his acute mind to a religious
problem, he contemplated it with the coolness and impartiality of a
geometer or chess player, his intellect operated _in vacuo_ so to
speak, untrammelled by any bias of sentiment or early training. He had
no profound associations to tear out of his heart. He merely altered
the premisses of a syllogism. When Catholicism was presented to him in
a logical form, it met with no inward bar and repugnance. The house
was empty and ready for a new guest, or rather the first guest. If
Gibbon anticipated the Tractarian movement intellectually, he was
farther removed than the poles are asunder from the mystic reverent
spirit which inspired that movement. If we read the _Apologia_ of Dr.
Newman, we perceive the likeness and unlikeness of the two cases. "As
a matter of simple conscience," says the latter, "I felt it to be a
duty to protest against the Church of Rome." At the time he refers to
Dr. Newman was a Catholic to a degree Gibbon never dreamed of. But in
the one case conscience and heart-ties "strong as life, stronger
almost than death," arrested the conclusions of the intellect. Ground
which Gibbon dashed over in a few months or weeks, the great
Tractarian took ten years to traverse. So different is the mystic from
the positive mind.

Gibbon had no sooner settled his new religion than he resolved with a
frankness which did him all honour to profess it publicly. He wrote to
his father, announcing his conversion, a letter which he afterwards
described, when his sentiments had undergone a complete change, as
written with all the pomp, dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr.
A momentary glow of enthusiasm had raised him, as