Already, in the latter part of the age of St. Paul, we shall see many things different from what they had been originally; and so it cannot appear strange if other changes come to be introduced into the constitution of the [Christian] communities, by the altered circumstances of the times immediately succeeding those of St. Paul or St. John. Then ensued those strongly marked oppositions and schisms, those dangers with which the corruptions engendered by manifold foreign elements threatened primitive Christianity. [88] Dr. Philip Smith, the author of the "Students' Ecclesiastical History," in speaking of the early corruptions of the Christian religion, says: The sad truth is that as soon as Christianity was generally diffused, it began to absorb corruption from all the lands in which it was planted, and to reflect the complexion of all their systems of religion and philosophy. [89] Dean Milman, in his preface to his annotated edition of Edward Gibbon's great work, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and commenting upon that great author's attitude respecting the Christian religion, says: 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. [90]