‘this whole passage of the latent sarcasm betrayed by the whole of the subsequent dissertation, and it might commence a Christian history, written in the most Christian spirit of candour.’ It is not for us here to go into any disquisition as to the comparative influence of the five earthly causes, to whose secondary operation the specious historian ascribes the progress of Christianity. Weariness and disinclination forbid. There can be no question that the polity of the Church, and the zeal of the converts, and other such things, did most materially conduce to the progress of the Gospel. But few will now attribute to these much of the effect. The real cause is the heaving of the mind after the truth. Troubled with the perplexities of time, weary with the vexation of ages, the spiritual faculty of man turns to the truth as the child turns to its mother. The thirst of the soul was to be satisfied, the deep torture of the spirit to have rest. There was an appeal to those ‘High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.’ The mind of man has an appetite for the truth. ‘Hence, in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither,— Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’ All this was not exactly in Gibbon’s way, and he does not seem to have been able to conceive that it was in any one else’s. Why his chapters had given offence he could hardly make out. It actually seems that he hardly thought that other people believed more than he did. ‘We may be well assured,’ says he, of a sceptic of antiquity, ‘that a writer conversant with the world would never have ventured to expose the gods of his country to public ridicule, had they not been already the objects of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened orders of society.’ ‘Had I,’ he says of himself, ‘believed that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of Christianity, had I foreseen that the pious, the timid, and the prudent would feel, or would affect to feel, with such exquisite sensibility,—I might perhaps have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies and conciliate few friends.’ The state of belief at that time is a very large subject; but it is probable that in the cultivated cosmopolitan classes the continental scepticism was very rife; that among the hard-headed classes the rough spirit of English Deism had made progress. Though the mass of the people doubtless believed much as they now believe, yet the entire upper class was lazy and corrupt, and there is truth in the picture of the modern divine: ‘The thermometer of the Church of England sunk to its lowest point in the first thirty years of the reign of George III.... In their preaching, nineteen clergymen out