And yet in spite of the incompatibility between Gibbon and Oxford, his university career was marked by an all-important incident in the development of the great historian. By education and training he was a Protestant, but, as was his habit with every subject to which he turned his attention, he did not merely read books and swallow their contents as indisputable facts. Everything he read was deeply pondered, made to pass under his own criticism, and then compared with other authors on the opposite side of the case. Consequently the subject of his own creed underwent deep thought, and after reading Middleton’s “Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church,” Gibbon’s religious beliefs were shaken. He decided that Protestantism was inconsistent; he was dissatisfied with it. Filled with the restlessness engendered by uncertainty, Gibbon read many works, including Bossuet’s “Variations of Protestantism” and “Exposition of Catholic Doctrine,” and the writings of the Jesuit priest, Father Parsons. “These works,” he said, “achieved my conversion”--the arguments in favour of Roman Catholicism put forward by the Jesuit priest being the real turning point in the scale. Having arrived at the conclusion that the Protestant religion paled into insignificance before the Roman Catholic one, the Magdalen man felt that he would know no happiness until he himself should join the ranks of the “Papists.” For once his thoroughness deserted him. He did not consider the question--and the question of a man’s entirely changing his religious beliefs is a very vital one--with his usual exhaustiveness. Like a baby with a new toy, Gibbon, the great and wonderful man of brain, world famous and immortal, made a complete fool of himself. He rushed off to London without more ado, and there, under the influence of a “momentary glow of enthusiasm,” “privately abjured the heresies” of his childhood before a certain Father Baker, also a Jesuit, and became a Roman Catholic. For the moment his belief was red hot, and he wrote a burningly defiant letter to his father announcing his change of creed. The elder Gibbon at once provided an excuse for his being sent down (a circumstance which very probably would have come about on the Magdalen Dons’ own initiative without any excuse being offered to them), and packed him off to the care of the Calvanistic minister at Lausanne, M. Pavilliard. The scattering of the hastily-swallowed, undigested arguments which had brought about Gibbon’s precipitate action, was a matter of a few months to M. Pavilliard, and in less than two years he was once more a fully convinced Protestant. The ex-Magdalen man’s _amour propre_ is fully demonstrated by the unblushing assertion that although the Calvinist minister had “a handsome share in his re-conversion,” yet it was principally brought about “by his own solitary reflections.” Doubtless when he wrote those