natures were now passing into the religious
revival of Wesley and Whitefield, which was slowly transforming the
character of the Anglican Church and laying the foundations of the great
Evangelical party. In other quarters the predominant tendencies were
towards unbelief, skepticism, or indifference. Nature seldom formed a
more skeptical intellect than that of Gibbon, and he was utterly without
the spiritual insight, or spiritual cravings, or overmastering
enthusiasms, that produce and explain most religious changes. Nor was he
in the least drawn towards Catholicism on its aesthetic side. He had
never come in contact with its worship or its professors; and to his
unimaginative, unimpassioned, and profoundly intellectual temperament,
no ideal type could be more uncongenial than that of the saint. He had
however from early youth been keenly interested in theological
controversies. He argued, like Lardner and Paley, that miracles are the
Divine attestation of orthodoxy. Middleton convinced him that unless the
Patristic writers were wholly undeserving of credit, the gift of
miracles continued in the Church during the fourth and fifth centuries;
and he was unable to resist the conclusion that during that period many
of the leading doctrines of Catholicism had passed into the Church. The
writings of the Jesuit Parsons, and still more the writings of Bossuet,
completed the work which Middleton had begun. Having arrived at this
conclusion, Gibbon acted on it with characteristic honesty, and was
received into the Church on the 8th of June, 1753.

The English universities were at this time purely Anglican bodies, and
the conversion of Gibbon excluded him from Oxford. His father
judiciously sent him to Lausanne to study with a Swiss pastor named
Pavilliard, with whom he spent five happy and profitable years. The
theological episode was soon terminated. Partly under the influence of
his teacher, but much more through his own reading and reflections, he
soon disentangled the purely intellectual ties that bound him to the
Church of Rome; and on Christmas Day, 1754, he received the sacrament in
the Protestant church of Lausanne.

His residence at Lausanne was very useful to him. He had access to books
in abundance, and his tutor, who was a man of great good sense and
amiability but of no remarkable capacity, very judiciously left his
industrious pupil to pursue his studies in his own way. "Hiving wisdom
with each studious year," as B