It  is  quite  otherwise  when  (jerminating  events  are  in
question,  for  if  you  reject  these,  or  if  you  seriously  call


60  CONSIDERATIONS

in  qiiestion  tlieir  reality,  you  have  done  only  a  half,  or
less  than  a  half,  of  what  it  behoves  you  to  do  in  such  an
instance.  If  indeed  there  was  no  William  of  Nor-
mandy, and  no  landing  of  his  knights  on  our  shores,
or  no  Charles  Martel,  or  no  Mahomet,  or  no  Justinian,
or  no  Charlemagne,  then,  when  you  have  reduced
these  imagined  substances  to  their  proper  condition  as
shadows,  you  must  make  good  the  large  gaps  which
this  destructive  operation  has  occasioned.  You  must
bring  forward  a  reasonable  and  an  intelligible  hypo-
thesis, which  shall  fit  in  to  so  many  fragmentary  facts.
There  are  a  thousand  facts  which  are  a  ten  thousand-
times  reflected  in  the  mirror  of  the  past,  and  these  now
stand  before  us  uncaused,  unaccounted  for ;  they  are
real,  and  yet  they  have  sprung  out  of  nothing.  It  is
precisely  this  part  of  their  task  that  has  perplexed,  and
that  now  perplexes,  those  who  reject  Christianity.  In
his  noted  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  chapters,  Gibbon
has  immortalized  his  ingenuity  while  struggling  in  the
fruitless  endeavour  to  disengage  Christianity  from  its
true  origin.  And  thus  has  it  been  in  continuance  to
the  present  moment.  Christianity  is  a  vast  congeries
and  complicity  of  facts ;  it  is  the  causal  centre  of
numberless  radiating  lines ;  it  is  the  spring  of
thousands  of  streams.  Remove  it  from  its  place,  and
the  entire  structure  of  modern  history  crumbles  into
dust ; — a  chaos  is  left  to  us  as  our  future  inheritance
on  the  wilds  of  time.
