[163] time Gibbon thought it well to protect himself and his work against the possibility of prosecution by paying ironical lip-homage to the orthodox creed.  But even if there had been no such danger, he could not have chosen a more incisive weapon for his merciless criticism of orthodox opinion than the irony which he wielded with superb ease.  Having pointed out that the victory of Christianity is obviously and satisfactorily explained by the convincing evidence of the doctrine and by the ruling providence of its great Author, he proceeds “with becoming submission” to inquire into the secondary causes.  He traces the history of the faith up to the time of Constantine in such a way as clearly to suggest that the hypothesis of divine interposition is superfluous and that we have to do with a purely human development.  He marshals, with ironical protests, the obvious objections to the alleged evidence for supernatural control.  He does not himself criticize Moses and the prophets, but he reproduces the objections which were made against their authority by “the vain science of the gnostics.”  He notes that the doctrine of immortality is omitted in the law of Moses, but this doubtless was a mysterious dispensation of Providence.  We cannot entirely remove “the imputation of ignorance and

[164] obscurity which has been so arrogantly cast on the first proselytes of Christianity,” but we must “convert the occasion of scandal into a subject of edification” and remember that “the lower we depress the temporal condition of the first Christians, the more reason we shall find to admire their merit and success.”

Gibbon’s treatment of miracles from the purely historical point of view (he owed a great deal to Middleton, see above, p. 150) was particularly disconcerting.  In the early age of Christianity “the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church.  But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.  Under the reign of Tiberius the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman Empire, was involved in a praeternatural darkness of three hours.  Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history.  It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence, of the prodigy.  Each of these

[165] philosophers in a laborious work has recorded all the great phenomena of nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect.  Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe.”  How “shall we excuse the supine inattention of the pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses?”