he 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 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 narro