He indeed soon commenced a line of study which
was destined to have a lasting influence on the remainder of his
course through life.
He had an inborn taste for theology and the controversies which have
arisen concerning religious dogma. "From my childhood," he says, "I
had been fond of religious disputation: my poor aunt has often been
puzzled by the mysteries which she strove to believe." How he carried
the taste into mature life, his great chapters on the heresies and
controversies of the Early Church are there to show. This inclination
for theology, co-existing with a very different temper towards
religious sentiment, recalls the similar case of the author of the
_Historical and Critical Dictionary_, the illustrious Pierre Bayle,
whom Gibbon resembled in more ways than one. At Oxford his religious
education, like everything else connected with culture, had been
entirely neglected. It seems hardly credible, yet we have his word for
it, that he never subscribed or studied the Articles of the Church of
England, and was never confirmed. When he first went up, he was judged
to be too young, but the Vice-Chancellor directed him to return as
soon as he had completed his fifteenth year, recommending him in the
meantime to the instruction of his college.
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