Edward Gibbon Quote

A small number of temples was protected by the fears, the venality, the taste, or the prudence of the civil and ecclesiastical governors. The temple of the Celestial Venus at Carthage, whose sacred precincts formed a circumference of two miles, was judiciously converted into a Christian church; and a similar consecration has preserved inviolate the majestic dome of the Pantheon at Rome.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The 2. Ed. - London, W. Strahan 1776-1788 (ed. 1781)