The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the contrast between the ideal concept of religion and the imperfections it acquires over time through human influence.
Edward Gibbon highlights the duality of religion's existence: while it may have originated in a pure and divine state, its journey through history has led to its association with various errors and corruptions. This observation speaks to the struggle between idealism and reality, questioning how human engagement has impacted something that was once considered sacred.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of religion on society, you might say, 'As Gibbon noted, religion often bears the scars of human imperfection.'
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
People who don't see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are lairs and fools.
Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?
We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.
The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.
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