In his preface to his latest book on John Henry Newman, Newman and History (Gracewing, £20), American writer Edward Short says that he wanted to share Newman’s “brilliant historical insights” and his prophetic understanding of “the gathering calamity of unbelief”. I have been reading this collection of essays and reviews with great interest and am thus keen to get the author of them to expand on what he means. Given that the book’s first and longest essay is on the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, I ask Short to elucidate the phrase he uses of Gibbon: “A typical Enlightenment historian”. He tells me that Gibbon “equated religion, like Hume and Voltaire, with superstition. He derided theology as hermeneutical hair-splitting and refused to credit the supernatural convictions of Christianity as anything other than the preoccupations of credulity or fanaticism. Furthermore, he insisted that the only way the rise of Christianity could be rationally treated by proper historians was by looking at the externals of the religion, not its spurious faith.” Short points out: “This accounts for the fact that Gibbon, like so many rationalist historians after him, refuses to credit martyrdom as the animating impetus of Christianity’s rise. This naturally suited the Protestant Establishment in England because, with Gibbon as the country’s only ecclesiastical historian throughout the 18th century, his history had the benefit of confirming his countrymen in their contempt for what they chose to regard as the corruption of Popery.”