‘Why, no; but what though it were!—the Bible is a respectable book, but I should hardly call it one whose philosophy is of the soundest. I have said that it is a respectable book; I mean respectable from its antiquity, and from containing, as Herder says, “the earliest records of the human race,” though those records are far from being dispassionately written, on which account they are of less value than they otherwise might have been. There is too much passion in the Bible, too much violence; now, to come to all truth, especially historic truth, requires cool dispassionate investigation, for which the Jews do not appear to have ever been famous. We are ourselves not famous for it, for we are a passionate people; the Germans are not—they are not a passionate people—a people celebrated for their oaths; we are. The Germans have many excellent historic writers, we . . . ’tis true we have Gibbon. . . . You have been reading Gibbon—what do you think of him?’ ‘I think him a very wonderful writer.’ ‘He is a wonderful writer—one _sui generis_—uniting the perspicuity of the English—for we are perspicuous—with the cool dispassionate reasoning of the Germans. Gibbon sought after the truth, found it, and made it clear.’ ‘Then you think Gibbon a truthful writer?’ ‘Why, yes; who shall convict Gibbon of falsehood? Many people have endeavoured to convict Gibbon of falsehood; they have followed him in his researches, and have never found him once tripping. Oh, he is a wonderful writer! his power of condensation is admirable; the lore of the whole world is to be found in his pages. Sometimes in a single note he has given us the result of the study of years; or, to speak metaphorically, “he has ransacked a thousand Gulistans, and has condensed all his fragrant booty into a single drop of otto.’” ‘But was not Gibbon an enemy to the Christian faith?’