The defeat of Mohammedism by Christendom certainly has not been effected by spiritual weapons.

The soldier and the statesman have done to the full as much as the priest to secure Europe for Christianity, and win a Christendom of which Christians can be proud.

As for the Christendom of Asia, the apologists of Christianity simply ignore it.

With these facts, how can it be pretended that the external history of Christianity points to an exclusively divine origin?
The author of the "Eclipse of Faith" has derided me for despatching in two paragraphs what occupied Gibbon's whole fifteenth chapter; but this author, here as always, misrepresents me.

Gibbon is exhibiting and developing the deep-seated causes of the spread of Christianity before Constantine, and he by no means exhausts the subject.