he has given of the
spread of Christianity in the Fifteenth Chapter were for the most part
true causes, but there were others of which he was wholly insensible.
The strong moral enthusiasms that transform the character and inspire or
accelerate all great religious changes lay wholly beyond the sphere of
his realizations. His language about the Christian martyrs is the most
repulsive portion of his work; and his comparison of the sufferings
caused by pagan and Christian persecutions is greatly vitiated by the
fact that he only takes account of the number of deaths, and lays no
stress on the profuse employment of atrocious tortures, which was one of
the most distinct features of the pagan persecutions. At the same time,
though Gibbon displays in this field a manifest and a distorting bias,
he never, like some of his French contemporaries, sinks into the mere
partisan, awarding to one side unqualified eulogy and to the other
unqualified contempt. Let the reader who doubts this examine and compare
his masterly portraits of Julian and of Athanasius, and he will perceive
how clearly the great historian could recognize weaknesses in the
characters by which he was most attracted, and elements of true
greatness in those by which he was most repelled. A modern writer, in
treating of the history of religions, would have given a larger space to
comparative religion, and to the gradual, unconscious, and spontaneous
growth of myths in the twilight periods of the human mind. These however
were subjects which were scarcely known in the days of Gibbon, and he
cannot be blamed for not having discussed them.

Another class of objections which has been brought against him is that
he is weak upon the philosophical side, and deals with history mainly
as a mere chronicle of events, and not as a chain of causes and
consequences, a series of problems to be solved, a gradual evolution
which it is the task of the historian to explain. Coleridge, who
detested Gibbon and spoke of him with gross injustice, has put this
objection in the strongest form. He accuses him of having reduced
history to a mere collection of splendid anecdotes; of noting nothing
but what may produce an effect; of skipping from eminence to eminence
without ever taking his readers through the valleys between; of having
never made a single philosophical attempt to fathom the ultimate causes
of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which is the very subject
of his history. Th