Note 32 — Chapter III · THE DESTRUCTIVE CHARACTER OF MODERN BIBLE CRITICISM
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With regard to the prodigy of the darkness, etc., that occurred at the death of Jesus, Gibbon informs us as follows: “It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature—earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses—which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. But the one and the other has omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe.”32 Any attempt to explain this away by supposing that the darkness of three hours was local only detracts from the magnitude of the miracle, which was intended, by its very magnitude, to be one of the proofs of the death of a God.