To turn from the question of Gibbon's intentions and performance in writing chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall to that of their reception in the years preceding publication of his second volume is to encounter the question of how his respondents interpreted these intentions and whether their interpretations coincide with those of a historian today. This is in turn to encounter two further problems. The language used by Gibbon of which his critics complained was indirect and allusive; they interpreted it as conveying a set of intentions subversive of revealed Christianity. The historian seeking to estimate Gibbon's intentions encounters the same problem of indirectness, and must decide how far they were as subversive as their critics said they were. It is a further problem, however, that most historians until very recently, being agnostic and post-Christian, have taken as granted a process of Enlightenment amounting to a subversion of Christianity, in which Gibbon took part. As a curious consequence of this assumption, they have on the one hand despised Gibbon's Christian critics as impotent defenders of a religion doomed to subversion, while on the other accepting an account of his intentions as subversive as indistinguishable from that of his adversaries. They agree that Gibbon intended to subvert the Christian revelation by irony and innuendo, while accepting and applauding his success in doing so.