St. GEORGE AND BANK HOLIDAYS

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3673, 23 April 1883, Page 3

St. GEORGE AND BANK HOLIDAYS

[To the Editor of the Daily Telkgr.-ph.] Sir, —In his reA-ieAV of Gibbons' immortal •work, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," the German philosopher and historian Niebuhr—perhaps the greatest authority in these matters the Avorld has over seen—makes the folloAving remark, " English theologians and historians, beware of contradicting Gibbon." But " fools rush in -where angels fear to tread," and bishops and other dignitaries of the church, Catholic! and Protestant alike, have exhausted their stock of learning in trying to impugn Ids statements ; and, failing to do so, have been reduced to the humiliation of '' eating their oaaii words." And yet, AA"ith this memorable warning in his ears, and so many illustrious- failures before his eyes, your heedless correspondent, A. D. Mulvihill, has the temerity to come forth as a contradictor of Gibbon. Should avc laugh AA'hen a man butts his pate against a rock ? Your correspondent says that Gibbon has been misled by false historians. This looks as if your correspondent had never seen Gibbons' great Avork, or that he has got hold of some spurious edition, otherwise he ■would have knoAvn that Gibbon ransacked the libraries of Europe for his materials, and that, Avhcncvcr he states anything as a fact, he gives his authorities in tho notes. In this instance of the identity of St. George Avith George of Cappadocia, the authority quoted, and (according to yoiu- correspondent) tho false historian avlio has misled Gibbon on this occasion, is none other than Pope Golasius: and it is Pope Golasius himself a\'lio first places the notorious George amongst the saints and martyrs (A.D. 191). If the Pope is to bo believed there is no doubt that St. George is one and the same Avith the infamous George of Cappadocia, tho fraudulent bacon contractor, the informer, the corrupter of bishops, the monopolist, aud the persecuter of Athanasius, who, being au Archbishop of the early Christian Church, and becoming the victim,of an infuriated populace, AA'hom his intolerable oppression had driven to desperation, the manner of his death has obliterated the infamy of his life ; the church has glorified him as a saint and martyr, and his memory is honored with bank holidays in the nineteenth century. Your correspondent must be a very young Christian, if not in years, in religious discussion, or he would have learnt long ago to let Gibbon aloue; or, like some of his fellow Christians, have confined himself to circulating spurious editions of his great work under the pious pretext that an unmutilated Gibbon is unfit for Christian reading. And Avhy unfit . Because he lifts the curtain and slioavs that the images Aye are taught to revere are hollow and corrupt; because he slioavs that man's history teaches ag-ain a«d ajraj« that "so urgent on ttie

vulgar is the necessity of believing that the downfall of any system of religion will most probably be succeeded by some other mode of superstition ;" and the enlightened few, concealing a " smile of contempt beneath a mask of devotion," have ever regarded religion as a composition of human fraud and error.—l am, ke., Quintilianus. Napier, April 23, ISS3.