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and, as he puts it, have sunk into the 'fat slumbers of the Church.' The deliverance came by the most apparently unfavourable turn of fortune. Gibbon's conversion to Catholicism appeared in later life to himself and to others to be a mere boyish freak. He could only wonder how he had ever believed such nonsense. Of course the conversion of a lad just sixteen was a superficial process. His imagination had not been swayed by the aesthetic charm of the Church, nor did he come as one wearied by sceptical wanderings and longing for spiritual slavery. He was apparently the victim of a single argument, and convictions so produced are easily modified. But the argument was also curiously characteristic. The lad had been left to wander rough in theological as other literature, guided only 'by the dim light of his catechism,' and his omnivorous appetite for all knowledge was stimulated by a contemporary controversy. Conyers Middleton was then making a sensation resembling that created about a century afterwards by Essays and Reviews. The old deistical movement in his hands was becoming mainly historical instead of metaphysical. It raised, therefore, the great problem to which Gibbon was substantially to devote his life.