Edward Gibbon was born at Putney, the 27th April, 1737, and died 16th January, 1794. He was a polished and painstaking writer, aristocratic in his tendencies and associations, who had educated himself into a disbelief in the principal dogmas of Christianity, but who loved the peace and quietude of an easy life too much to enter the lists as an active antagonist of the Church. His works, especially the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” have been regarded as infidel in their tendency, rather from what has been left unsaid than from the direct statements against Christianity. The sneer at the evidence of prophecy, or the doubt of the reality of miraculous evidences, is guardedly expressed. It is only when Gibbon can couch his lance against some reckless and impudent forger of Christian evidences, such as Eusebius, that you have anything like a bold condemnation. A prophecy or a miracle is treated tenderly, and if killed, it is rather with over-affectionate courtesy than by rough handling. In some parts of his vindications of the attacked passages, Gibbon’s scepticism finds vent in the collection and quotation of unpleasantly heretical views of others, but he carefully avoids committing himself to very distinct personal declarations of disbelief; he claims to be the unbiased historian recording fact, and leaving others to form their own conclusions. It would perhaps be most appropriate to express his convictions as to the religions of the world, in nearly the same words as those which he used to characterise the various modes of worship at Rome: “All considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”