more dry Gibbon

Gibbon, never much impressed by Christianity, offers the following forgiveness for contemporary Romans who adopted the faith:

“Nor can it be deemed incredible that the mind of an unlettered soldier should have yielded to the weight of evidence, which, in a more enlightened age, has satisfied or subdued the reason of a Grotius, a Pascal, or a Locke.”

Despite amusing lines like this, the chapters of his history that deal with Christianity always feel weaker to me than the others. He goes into “debunker” mode, and the quality of his writing and his storytelling starts to suffer.