ABSTRACT
A Cambridge librarian drove Edward Gibbon into the arms of the Roman Catholic Church.2 In 1753, while a student at Oxford, Gibbon read A Free Inquiry into the miraculous powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, from the earliest ages through several successive centuries (1749). It was a work whose thesis was suggested in its title, for it argued that the miracles which ‘subsisted’ in the primitive Church were, in fact, ‘supposed’. Written by Conyers Middleton (1683-1750), ‘the most acute controvertist of the Age’, the Free Inquiry rattled Gibbon.3 ‘The name of Middleton was unpopular; and his proscription very naturally led me to peruse his writings, and those of his antagonists’, Gibbon recollected. From that reading, he developed unsettling doubts about the authenticity of the Christian miracles during the centuries immediately following the apostolic age. ‘I still revered the character, or rather the names, of the saints and fathers whom Dr. Middleton exposes; nor could he destroy my implicit belief that the gifts of miraculous powers were continued in the church, during the first four or five centuries of Christianity’, Gibbon recalled. He continued:
2 For Middleton’s influence on Gibbon, see D. Womersley, Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: the Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1815 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 309-13; J.M. Levine, ‘From Tradition to History: Chillingworth to Gibbon’, in A. Grafton and J.H.M. Salmon, eds., Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY, 2001), pp. 181-2; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the primitive church’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B.W. Young, eds., History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750-1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 48-67, esp. 54-5; idem, Barbarism and Religion: Volume One: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 45-7; and B.W. Young, ‘“Scepticism in Excess”: Gibbon and Eighteenth-Century Christianity’ in Historical Journal, 41/1 (1998), pp. 179-99, esp. 182-5. Eighteenth-century spellings and punctuation have been modernized. Unless otherwise noted, the place of publication is London.
