religion. The further Christianity advanced, the more causes
purely human were enlisted in its favor; nor can it be doubted
that those developed with such artful exclusiveness by Gibbon did
concur most essentially to its establishment. It is in the
Christian dispensation, as in the material world. In both it is
as the great First Cause, that the Deity is most undeniably
manifest. When once launched in regular motion upon the bosom of
space, and endowed with all their properties and relations of
weight and mutual attraction, the heavenly bodies appear to
pursue their courses according to secondary laws, which account
for all their sublime regularity. So Christianity proclaims its
Divine Author chiefly in its first origin and development. When
it had once received its impulse from above - when it had once
been infused into the minds of its first teachers - when it had
gained full possession of the reason and affections of the
favored few - it might be - and to the Protestant, the rationa
Christian, it is impossible to define when it really was - left
to make its way by its native force, under the ordinary secret
agencies of all-ruling Providence. The main question, the divine
origin of the religion, was dexterously eluded, or speciously
conceded by Gibbon; his plan enabled him to commence his account,
in most parts, below the apostolic times; and it was only by the
strength of the dark coloring with which he brought out the
failings and the follies of the succeeding ages, that a shadow of
doubt and suspicion was thrown back upon the primitive period of
Christianity.


"The theologian," says Gibbon, "may indulge the pleasing
task of describing religion as she descended from heaven, arrayed