On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief upon intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of energy to the new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but by the recent scholarly literature of France, had as a mere boy seen, on reading Bossuet, the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and had straightway professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled Swiss Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple, with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity, but by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things. The importance of the new approach may be at once measured by the zeal of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essentially passional character of religious resistance to new thought been more vividly shown than in that of the contemporary attacks upon Gibbon's History. There is not to be found in controversial literature such another annihilating rejoinder as was made by Gibbon to the clerical zealots who undertook to confound him on points of scholarship, history, and ratiocination. The contrast between the mostly spiteful incompetence of the attack and the finished mastery of the reply put the faith at a disadvantage from which it never intellectually recovered, though other forces reinstated it socially. By the admission of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon "most unfair" to religion, the whole troup of his assailants are now "utterly forgotten"; and those orthodox commentators who later sought to improve on their criticism have in turn, with a notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors; till Gibbon's critical section ranks as the first systematically scientific handling of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He can be seen to have profited by all the relevant deistic work done before him, learning alike from Toland, from Middleton, and from Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim, and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it against a hundred years of hostile comment. [904] While Gibbon was thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the orthodox interest was concerned above all things to convict him of ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty; and Davis, the one of his assailants who most fully manifested all of these qualities, and who will long