in her native purity; a more melancholy duty is imposed upon the
historian: - he must discover the inevitable mixture of error and
corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth
among a weak and degenerate race of beings." Divest this passage
of the latent sarcasm betrayed by the subsequent tone of the
whole disquisition, and it might commence a Christian history
written in the most Christian spirit of candor. But as the
historian, by seeming to respect, yet by dexterously confounding
the limits of the sacred land, contrived to insinuate that it was
an Utopia which had no existence but in the imagination of the
theologian - as he suggested rather than affirmed that the days
of Christian purity were a kind of poetic golden age; - so the
theologian, by venturing too far into the domain of the
historian, has been perpetually obliged to contest points on
which he had little chance of victory - to deny facts established
on unshaken evidence - and thence, to retire, if not with the
shame of defeat, yet with but doubtful and imperfect success.
Paley, with his intuitive sagacity, saw through the
difficulty of answering Gibbon by the ordinary arts of
controversy; his emphatic sentence, "Who can refute a sneer?"
contains as much truth as point. But full and pregnant as this
phrase is, it is not quite the whole truth; it is the tone in
which the progress of Christianity is traced, in comparison with
the rest of the splendid and prodigally ornamented work, which is
the radical defect in the "Decline and Fall." Christianity alone
receives no embellishment from the magic of Gibbon's language;
his imagination is dead to its moral dignity; it is kept down by
a general zone of jealous disparagement, or neutralized by a
painfully elaborate exposition of its darker and degenerate
periods. There are occasions, indeed, when its pure and exalted