Gibbon to be one of the major causes of the decline and fall. To Gibbon, a standing army was a threatening element. So were individual soldiers. Gibbon explains, with irony, that the enrollment of barbarian troops accelerated the trend toward the "perversion" of pacifism in the broader society. The hiring of mercenary troops imposed a ruinous financial burden (I, 136), and the quality of those troops deteriorated. Successive generations of the governing class "experienced a failure of nerve, a loss of virtue, and so abdicated to successive groups of non-Romans the role of defending Rome". For Gibbon, that meant "the last sparks of the military flame were finally extinguished" (III, 130). Religion Gibbon believed that the adoption of Christianity as the religion of Rome in the fourth century was an important factor in the fall of the Empire. He said that Christianity "preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister." The Church caused the diversion of money and manpower away from the needs of the Empire. Gibbon was criticized for his linkage of the rise of Christianity with the decline of Rome. Gibbon's treatment of Christianity retains its place in political categorization as Gibbon characterized the Christian community of Antiquity as a polity even during its period of persecution. According to Clifford Ando, "Gibbon identifies three causes of the empire's decline and excuses two more. The two factors absolved are the barbarians and Christianity". This is because Gibbon saw empire as already advanced in decline before either of these became a factor. Christianity typified superstition in Gibbon's view, and its spirituality was subversive of the traditional Roman virtues (IV, 162), but monks and eunuchs were not agents of social change so much as they were symptoms of a decline already taking place. Vegetius on military decline Writing in the 5th century, the Roman historian Vegetius pleaded for reform of what must have been a greatly weakened army. The historian Arther Ferrill has suggested that the Roman Empire – particularly the military – declined largely as a result of an influx of Germanic mercenaries into the ranks of the legions. This "Germanization" and the resultant cultural dilution or "barbarization" led not only to a decline in the standard of drill and overall military preparedness within the Empire, but also to a decline