Nor was my conclusion absurd that miracles are the test of truth, and that the Church must be orthodox and pure which was so often approved by the visible interposition of the Deity.

The marvellous tales which are boldly attested by the Basils and Chrysostoms, the Austins and Jeromes, compelled me to embrace the superior merits of celibacy, the institution of the monastic life, the use of the sign of the cross, of holy oil, and even of images, the invocation of saints, the worship of relics, the rudiments of purgatory in prayers for the dead, and the tremendous mystery of the sacrifice of the body and the blood of Christ, which insensibly swelled into the prodigy of transubstantiation." In this remarkable passage we have a distinct foreshadow of the Tractarian movement, which came seventy or eighty years afterwards.

Gibbon in 1752, at the age of fifteen, took up a position practically the same as Froude and Newman took up about the year 1830.

In other words, he reached the famous _via media_ at a bound.
But a second spring soon carried him clear of it, into the bosom of the Church of Rome.
He had come to what are now called Church principles, by the energy of his own mind working on the scanty data furnished him by Middleton.

By one of those accidents which usually happen in such cases, he made the acquaintance of a young gentleman who had already embraced Catholicism, and who was well provided with controversial tracts in favour of Romanism.