For the last time the effect figures as the cause.

Union and discipline we know are powerful, but we know also that they are the result of deep antecedent forces, and that prudence and policy alone never produced them.
It can surprise no one that Gibbon has treated the early Church in a way which is highly unsatisfactory if judged by a modern standard.

Not only is it a period which criticism has gone over again and again with a microscope, but the standpoint from which such periods are observed has materially changed since his day.

That dim epoch of nascent faith, full of tender and subdued tints, with a high light on the brows of the Crucified, was not one in which he could see clearly, or properly see at all.

He has as little insight into the religious condition of the pagan world, as of the Christian.