Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1 | Page 8

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 humanity,
when its manifestly beneficial influence, can compel even him, as it were, to fairness, and
kindle his unguarded eloquence to its usual fervor; but, in general, he soon relapses into a
frigid apathy; affects an ostentatiously severe impartiality; notes all the faults of
Christians in every age with bitter and almost malignant sarcasm; reluctantly, and with
exception and reservation, admits their claim to admiration. This inextricable bias
appears even to influence his manner of composition. While all the other assailants of the
Roman empire, whether warlike or religious, the Goth, the Hun, the Arab, the Tartar,
Alaric and Attila, Mahomet, and Zengis, and Tamerlane, are each introduced upon the
scene almost with dramatic animation - their progress related in a full, complete, and
unbroken narrative - the triumph of Christianity alone takes the form of a cold and critical
disquisition. The successes of barbarous energy and brute force call forth all the

consummate skill of composition; while the moral triumphs of Christian benevolence -
the tranquil heroism of endurance, the blameless purity, the contempt of guilty fame and
of honors destructive to the human race, which, had they assumed the proud name of
philosophy, would have been blazoned in his brightest words, because they own religion
as their principle - sink into narrow asceticism. The glories of Christianity, in short, touch
on no chord in the heart of the writer; his imagination remains unkindled; his words,
though they maintain their stately and measured march, have become cool, argumentative,
and inanimate. Who would obscure one hue of that gorgeous coloring in which Gibbon
has invested the dying forms of Paganism, or darken one paragraph in his splendid view
of the rise and progress of Mahometanism? But who would not have wished that the
same equal justice had been done to Christianity; that its real character and deeply
penetrating influence had been traced with the same philosophical sagacity, and
represented with more sober, as would become its quiet course, and perhaps less
picturesque, but still with lively and attractive, descriptiveness? He might have thrown
aside, with the same scorn, the mass of ecclesiastical fiction which envelops the early
history of the church, stripped off the legendary romance, and brought out the facts in
their primitive nakedness and simplicity - if he had but allowed those facts the benefit of
the glowing eloquence which he denied to them alone. He might have annihilated the
whole fabric of post-apostolic miracles, if he had left uninjured by sarcastic insinuation
those of the New Testament; he might have cashiered, with Dodwell, the whole host of
martyrs, which owe their existence to the prodigal invention of later days, had he but
bestowed fair room, and dwelt with his ordinary energy on the sufferings of the genuine
witnesses to the truth of Christianity, the Polycarps, or the martyrs of Vienne. And indeed,
if, after all, the view of the early progress of Christianity be melancholy and humiliating
we must beware lest we charge the whole of this on the infidelity of the historian. It is
idle, it is disingenuous, to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its
gradual but rapid departure from its primitive simplicity and purity, still more, from its
spirit of universal love. It may be no unsalutary lesson to the Christian world, that this
silent, this unavoidable, perhaps, yet fatal change shall have been drawn by an impartial,
or even an hostile hand. The Christianity of every age may take warning, lest by its own
narrow views, its want of wisdom, and its want of charity, it give the same advantage to
the future unfriendly historian, and disparage the cause of true religion.
The design of the present edition is partly corrective, partly supplementary: corrective, by
notes, which point out (it is hoped, in a perfectly candid and dispassionate spirit with no
desire but to establish the truth) such inaccuracies or misstatements as may have been
detected, particularly with regard to Christianity; and which thus, with the previous
caution, may counteract to