332 GIBBON. 



authorities towards the new sect. But there runs a vein 

 of sneering and unfair insinuation always against Chris- 

 tians and their faith through the whole both of those 

 inquiries and other portions of ecclesiastical history, 

 especially the religious transactions of Constantino, nay, 

 through almost every part of the work in which any 

 opportunity is afforded by the subject, or can be made 

 often by pretty forcible means any opportunity of grati- 

 fying a disposition eminently uncharitable, wholly unfair, 

 and tinged with prejudices quite unworthy of a philoso- 

 pher, and altogether alien to the character of an his- 

 torian. Nor is the charge lessened, but rather aggra- 

 vated, by the pretence constantly kept up of his being a 

 believer, when any reader of the most ordinary sagacity 

 at once discovers that he is an unrelenting enemy of the 

 Christian name. Nothing can be more discreditable 

 to the individual, nothing, above all, more unworthy 

 the historian, than this subterfuge, resorted to for the 

 purpose of escaping popular odium. All men of right 

 feelings must allow that they would far more have re- 

 spected an open adversary, who comes forward to the 

 assault with a manly avowal of his disbelief, than they 

 can a concealed but bitter enemy who assumes the garb 

 of an ally, in order effectually to screen himself and 

 injure the cause he pretends to defend. 



To give instances of the unfairness which I have, in 

 common with all Gibbon's readers, reproved, would be too 

 easy not to prove superfluous. But the sixteenth chapter 

 must for ever be, in an especial manner, a monument of 

 his gross injustice or incurable prejudice. The eagerness 

 with which he seizes on every circumstance to extenuate 

 the dreadful persecutions that admit of no defeDce, is in 



