ABSTRACT
Gibbon's most recent critics, by contrast, have found, in the modulations of Gibbon's religious attitudes over time, a way of explaining the sometimes paradoxical complexity of his directly expressed or indirectly recorded opinions. The capacity of religious feeling to swing between opposing extremes, bypassing the middle ground of sceptical equilibrium, is observed by Gibbon with sympathy but also with a kind of longing. Gibbon describes Bayle as a man who balances the false Religions in his sceptical scales till the opposite quantities annihilate each other. Yet the Humean idea of mitigated scepticism that establishes a new equilibrium between radical doubt and superstitious, unthinking credulity is, in Gibbon's eyes, as unstable as any other kind of sceptical thought. Gibbon's regular periods of church attendance during his adult life, his possession and possible use of a family Bible, his early conversion to Catholicism and even anecdotal accounts of his dying words have been used by scholars of Gibbon.
