The atheism of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment was one factor but in Britain, he says, there were two books which did more than any other to undermine faith. These were Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788, and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years after his death.
