... Christianity, a perplexing and rather unaccountable phenomenon. The whole of that side of life seemed to them a kind of craziness in the human make-up. Gibbon's great history is essentially an attack upon Christianity as the operating cause of the decline and fall. He idealized the crude and gross plutocracy of Rome into a world of fine gentlemen upon the eighteenth-century model ... and of the Protestant princes. In an interregnum incommoded with an abundance of sleek parsons and sly priests it; was bard to realize what fires had once blazed in the heart of Christianity, and what fires...

• Word Count: 2009
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Graduate