ore, touch
my principal difficulties: and even as to the success of the system
when once elaborated,--his reasons are either a mere restatement of
the difficulty to be solved, or aggravate it indefinitely.

"You are hard to please," he replied.

I said I was, except by solid arguments. But does Gibbon offer them?
I asked.

He tells us, for example, that the virtues, energy, and zeal of the
early Church was a main instrument of the success of Christianity;
whereas it is the very origination of the early Church, with all
these efficacious endowments, that we want to account for: it is
as though he had told me that we might account for the success
of Christianity from the fact that it had succeed to such an extent
as to render its further success very probable! As for the rest
of his secondary causes, they are difficulties in its way rather
than auxiliaries. He asks me to believe that the intolerance of
Christianity--by which it refused all alliance with other
religions, and insisted in reigning alone or not at all, by which
it spat contempt on the whole rabble of the Pantheon--was likely
to facilitate its reception among nations, whose pride and whose
pleasure alike it was to encourage civilities and compliments between
their Gods, each of whom was on gracious visiting terms with its
neighbors! He asks me, in effect, to believe that the austerity of
the Christians tended to give them favor in the eves of an
accommodating and jovial Heathenism; that the severity of manners by
which they reproved it, and which to their contemporaries must have
appeared (as we know from the Apologists it did) much as Puritan
grimace to the court of Charles II., was somehow attractive! That
the scruples with which they recoiled from all usages and customs
which could be associated with the elegant pomp of Pagan worship,
and the suspicion with which, as having been linked with idolatry,
they looked on every emanation of that spirit of beauty which reigned
over the exterior life of Paganism, would operate as a charm in their
favor! That their studied absence from all scenes social hilarity,
their grave looks on festal days, their garlanded heads, their
simple attire, their utter estrangement from the Graces, which in
truth were the legitimate Gods in Greece, and the true mothers of
whole family of Olympus, would be likely to conciliate towards the
Gospel the favorable dispositions classic antiquity! I have not so
read history, nor learnt h