Gibbon's enumeration of the causes, not miraculous, of the spread of Christianity during the first three centuries is far from complete. This, however, is not the greatest defect of this celebrated chapter. The proportions of importance are not truly assigned; nay, the most effective causes are only not omitted--mentioned, indeed, but 'quasi in transitu', not developed or distinctly brought out: for example, the zealous despotism of the Cæsars, with the consequent exclusion of men of all ranks from the great interests of the public weal, otherwise than as servile instruments; in short, the direct contrary of that state and character of men's minds, feelings, hopes and fancies, which elections, Parliaments, Parliamentary reports, and newspapers produce in England; and this extinction of patriotism aided by the melting down of states and nations in the one vast yet heterogeneous Empire;--the number and variety of the parts acting only to make each insignificant in its own eyes, and yet sufficient to preclude all living interest in the peculiar institutions and religious forms of Rome; which beginning in a petty district, had, no less than the Greek republics, its mythology and [Greek: thraeskeia] intimately connected with localities and local events. The mere habit of staring or laughing at nine religions must necessarily end in laughing at the tenth, that is, the religion of the man's own birth-place. The first of these causes, that is, the detachment of all love and hope from the things of the visible world, and from temporal objects not merely selfish, must have produced in thousands a tendency to, and a craving after, an internal religion, while the latter occasioned an absolute necessity of a mundane as opposed to a national or local religion. I am far from denying or doubting the influence of the excellence of the Christian faith in the propagation of the Christian Church or the power of its evidences; but still I am persuaded that the necessity of some religion, and the untenable nature and obsolete superannuated character of all the others, occasioned the conversion of the largest though not the worthiest part of the new-made Christians. Here, though exploded in physics, we have recourse to the 'horror vacui' as an efficient cause. This view of the subject can offend or startle those only who, in their passion for wonderment, virtually exclude the agency of Providence from any share in the realizing of its own benignant scheme; as if the disposition of events by which the whole world of human history, from north and south, east and west, directed their march to one central point, the establishment of Christendom, were not the most stupendous of miracles! It is a yet sadder consideration, that the same men who can find God's presence and agency only in sensuous miracles, wholly misconceive the characteristic purpose and proper objects of historic Christianity and of the outward and visible Church, of which historic Christianity is the