tantiation:
that the text of Scripture which seems to inculcate the Real Presence
is attested only by a single sense--our sight; while the real presence
itself is disproved by three of our senses--the sight, the touch, and
the taste." He was unaware of the distinction between the logical
understanding and the higher reason, which has been made since his
time to the great comfort of thinkers of a certain stamp. Having
reached so far, his progress was easy and rapid. "The various articles
of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream, and after a full
conviction, on Christmas-day, 1754, I received the sacrament in the
church of Lausanne. It was here that I suspended my religious
inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and
mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and
Protestants." He thus had been a Catholic for about eighteen months.

Gibbon's residence at Lausanne was a memorable epoch in his life on
two grounds. Firstly, it was during the five years he spent there that
he laid the foundations of that deep and extensive learning by which
he was afterwards distinguished. Secondly, the foreign education he
there received, at the critical period when the youth passes into the
man, gave a permanent bent to his mind, and made him a continental
European rather than an insular Englishman--two highly important
factors in his intellectual growth.

He says that he went up to Oxford with a "stock of erudition which
might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a
schoolboy might have been ashamed." Both erudition and ignorance were
left pretty well undisturbed during his short and ill-starred
university career. At Lausanne he found himself, for the first time,
in possession of the means of successful study, good health, calm,
books, and tuition, up to a certain point: that point did not reach
very far. The good Pavillard, an excellent man, for whom Gibbon ever
entertained a sincere regard, was quite unequal to the task of forming
such a mind. There is no evidence that he was a ripe or even a fair
scholar, and the plain fact is that Gibbon belongs to the honourable
band of self-taught men. "My tutor," says Gibbon, "had the good sense
to discern how far he could be useful, and when he felt that I
advanced beyond his speed and measure, he wisely left me to my
genius." Under that good guidance he formed an extensive plan of
reviewing the Latin classics, in the four divisions of