Gibbon | Page 5

shows how soon the austere side of history had
attracted his attention. "In my childish balance," he says, "I presumed
to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and of
Newton; and my sleep has been disturbed by the difficulty of
reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation." Of course
his essay had the usual value of such juvenile productions; that is, none
at all, except as an indication of early bias to serious study of history.
On his return to Oxford, the age of Sesostris was wisely relinquished.
He indeed soon commenced a line of study which was destined to have
a lasting influence on the remainder of his course through life.
He had an inborn taste for theology and the controversies which have
arisen concerning religious dogma. "From my childhood," he says, "I
had been fond of religious disputation: my poor aunt has often been
puzzled by the mysteries which she strove to believe." How he carried
the taste into mature life, his great chapters on the heresies and
controversies of the Early Church are there to show. This inclination
for theology, co-existing with a very different temper towards religious
sentiment, recalls the similar case of the author of the Historical and
Critical Dictionary, the illustrious Pierre Bayle, whom Gibbon
resembled in more ways than one. At Oxford his religious education,
like everything else connected with culture, had been entirely neglected.
It seems hardly credible, yet we have his word for it, that he never
subscribed or studied the Articles of the Church of England, and was
never confirmed. When he first went up, he was judged to be too young,
but the Vice-Chancellor directed him to return as soon as he had
completed his fifteenth year, recommending him in the meantime to the
instruction of his college. "My college forgot to instruct; I forgot to
return, and was myself forgotten by the first magistrate of the
university. Without a single lecture, either public or private, either
Christian or Protestant, without any academical subscription, without
any episcopal ordination, I was left by light of my catechism to grope
my way to the chapel and communion table, where I was admitted
without question how far or by what means I might be qualified to
receive the sacrament. Such almost incredible neglect was productive

of the worst mischiefs." What did Gibbon mean by this last sentence?
Did he, when he wrote it, towards the end of his life, regret the want of
early religious instruction? Nothing leads us to think so, or to suppose
that his subsequent loss of faith was a heavy grief, supported, but
painful to bear. His mind was by nature positive, or even pagan, and he
had nothing of what the Germans call religiosität in him. Still there is a
passage in his Memoirs where he oddly enough laments not having
selected the fat slumbers of the Church as an eligible profession. Did he
reflect that perhaps the neglect of his religious education at Oxford had
deprived him of a bishopric or a good deanery, and the learned leisure
which such positions at that time conferred on those who cared for it?
He could not feel that he was morally, or even spiritually, unfit for an
office filled in his own time by such men as Warburton and Hurd. He
would not have disgraced the episcopal bench; he would have been
dignified, courteous, and hospitable; a patron and promoter of learning,
we may be sure. His literary labours would probably have consisted of
an edition of a Greek play or two, and certainly some treatise on the
Evidences of Christianity. But in that case we should not have had the
Decline and Fall.
The "blind activity of idleness" to which he was exposed at Oxford,
prevented any result of this kind. For want of anything better to do, he
was led to read Middleton's Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers
which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church. Gibbon
says that the effect of Middleton's "bold criticism" upon him was
singular, and that instead of making him a sceptic, it made him more of
a believer. He might have reflected that it is the commonest of
occurrences for controversialists to produce exactly the opposite result
to that which they intend, and that as many an apology for Christianity
has sown the first seeds of infidelity, so an attack upon it might well
intensify faith. What follows is very curious. "The elegance of style and
freedom of argument were repelled by a shield of prejudice. I still
revered the character, or rather the names of the saints and fathers
whom Dr. Middleton exposes; nor could he destroy my implicit belief
that the gift of miraculous powers was continued in the Church during
the first