hand, his historical instinct forced him at last to set forth the material facts both impartially and so grouped and related as to bring out the great issues. It is easy now both for positivists and believers to show, for example, that his account of the origins of Christianity was entirely insufficient. He explains, as has been remarked, the success of the Church by the zeal of the early disciples, and forgets to explain how they came to be zealous. Undoubtedly that is an omission of importance. What, however, Gibbon did was not the less effectively to bring out the real conditions of any satisfactory solution of the greatest of historical problems. Newman observed how, in a later period, 'Athanasius stands out more grandly in Gibbon than in the pages of the orthodox ecclesiastical historians.' That is because he places all events in their true historical setting. In the writings of the apologists of the time, the spread of Christianity was treated as though converts had been made by producing satisfactory evidence of miracles in a court of justice. Gibbon's famous chapters, however inadequate, showed at least that the development of the new creed required for its expansion a calm consideration of all the multitudinous forces
