I will read him again, I said, and with deep attention.  Some time after, in meeting with the same friend, I began upon Gibbon’s secondary causes.

“They have given you satisfaction, I hope.”

Any thing but that, I replied; they do not, as I said before, 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 human nature.  Again, he asks me to believe that the immortality which Christianity promised Heathen—­such an immortality —­was another of things which tended to give it success;—­on the one hand, a menace of retribution, not for flagrant crimes only,