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 THE 
 
 EXILES OF EVIDENCE 
 
 AS APPLICABLE TO THE 
 
 CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 
 
 BY { 
 
 l 
 
 W. FORSYTH, ESQ. Q.C. LL.D. M.P. 
 
 TO WHICH 13 ADDED 
 
 A 
 
 THE DISCUSSION THEREON. 
 
 liEPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE VICTORIA 
 INSTITUTE, OR PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 (i^ublisl^cU for tfje institute) 
 
 EGBERT HAEDiwiCKE, 192, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1874.
 
 THE RULES OF EVIDENCE 
 
 AS APPLICABLE 10 
 
 CEEDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 
 
 TO believe without any evidence at all is irrational; but to 
 disbelieve against sufficient evidence is equally irrational. 
 
 By sufficient evidence I mean such an amount of proof as 
 satisfies an unprejudiced mind beyond all reasonable doubt. 
 Mathematical truth alone admits of demonstration. All other 
 kinds of truth can only be proved by probabilities, which vary 
 in an almost infinite degree^ from the faintest kind of pre- 
 sumption to what is called moral certainty^ which is accepted 
 as practically equivalent to demonstration. 
 
 tJpon evidence depends all our knowledge of past events; 
 and it is astonishing how little is often sufficient to satisfy us. 
 The mere fact of its being written in a book is enough to make 
 no inconsiderable number of readers believe in the truth of a 
 statement, without reflecting whether the author had or had 
 not the means of ascertaining the truth; for if he had^ we may 
 be justified in putting faith in his honesty ; but if he had not, 
 his own assertion is worth nothing. 
 
 By proof I mean anything that serves, either mediately or 
 immediately, to convince the mind of the truth or falsehood 
 of a fact or proposition ; and proofs diff"er according to the 
 subject-matter of the thing to be proved. 
 
 One of the most common, and, at the same time, most 
 satisfactory modes of proof as to things which do not fall 
 within the experience of the senses is Induction, by which is 
 meant the inference drawn from proved or admitted facts. It 
 is for instance by induction that the general facts of Natural 
 History are proved. When we say that all ruminant animals 
 are cloven-footed, we cannot show any necessary connection 
 between these physical phenomena, but having ascertained by 
 a very large number of instances that they co-exist, and that in 
 
 (8) b 2
 
 4 
 
 no single case that has come under the observation of natural- 
 ists they fail, we are led irresistibly to the conclusion that the 
 proposition is universally true, and we should predicate with 
 confidence if a new race of animals were discovered in some 
 hitherto unknown region, that if they are ruminants they are 
 also cloven-footed. The underlying ground of belief in this 
 case is our innate conviction of the prevalence of uniformity 
 in Nature in things of the same kind. This uniformity we call 
 a Law. 
 
 One test of the probability of a fact is its consistency with 
 other facts previously known or admitted to be true — such as 
 the constitution of human nature, the ordinary course of events, 
 or some well-established truth. But it must be borne in mind, 
 as Laplace has said, although perhaps in a different sense, that 
 ^' Probability has reference partly to our ignorance, partly to 
 our knowledge.^^ We must be tolerably sure we do know the 
 other facts — and that they are not really inconsistent with the 
 fact in dispute. Otherwise we shall be following the example 
 of the King of Siam, who rejected as incredible the statement 
 of the Dutch ambassador, that water could become a solid 
 mass. This was simply because he had never seen or heard of 
 it before; and it was contrary to his limited experience, or 
 what he thought a law of nature. Hume felt the difficulty of 
 this instance in the way of his argument against miracles, and 
 attempts to get over it by saying that though the fact was not 
 contrary to the king's experience, it was not conformable to it. 
 But this is not a fair way of putting it. Frost was contrary 
 to the king's experience as much as walking on the water 
 without support is contrary to ours. And it cannot be 
 denied that when by universal experience certain laws of nature 
 are known to exist, it requires the strongest possible evidence to 
 make us believe in any deviation from them. Hume's famous 
 argument against miracles is, that no testiinony is sufficient to 
 establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind 
 that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact, and 
 that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a 
 miracle, because it is always more likely that the testimony 
 should be false than that the miracle should be true. 
 
 The late John Stuart Mill has dealt with this argument 
 in his Logic, and, I think, conclusively. He says that Hume's 
 celebrated doctrine, that nothing is credible which is contrary 
 to experience, or at variance with the laws of nature, is merely 
 the very plain and harmless proposition that whatever is con- 
 trary to a complete induction is incredible. And he goes on to 
 show that any alleged fact is only contradictory to a law of 
 causation when it is said to happen without an adequate coun-j?i«rei4^
 
 teracting cause. " Now/' says Mill, " in the case of an alleged 
 miracle the assertion is the exact opposite of this .... A 
 miracle is no contradiction to the law of cause and effect ; it is 
 a new effect supposed to be produced by the introduction of a 
 new cause/^ He adds, truly enough, "That if we do not 
 already believe in supernatural agencies no miracle can prove to 
 us their existence.^^ And we may freely admit with him, that 
 '' there is an antecedent improbability in every miracle, which 
 in order to outweigh it, requires an extraordinary strength of 
 antecedent probability derived from the special circumstances 
 of the case.'' I shall have occasion to allude to the subject of 
 miracles again hereafter. 
 
 History, from the Greek 'lo-rojota, properly signifies " investi- 
 gation " or " research," and implies, therefore, etymologically, 
 a narrative based upon inquiry about facts. 
 
 Few persons consider what the evidence is of the genuine- 
 ness of books attributed to authors who lived before the inven- 
 tion of printing, most of which are derived from manuscripts 
 which themselves were only copies, the originals having been 
 utterly destroyed or lost. This includes all the histories of 
 Greece and Kome written by classic authors. I have dealt 
 with this subject in a lecture I delivered in 1872, in the Hall 
 of the Inner Temple, which has since been published under the 
 title of History of Ancient Manuscripts. I have not time to 
 enter upon it here, but it is a very interesting subject of 
 inquiry. I will only mention what Tischendorf, the great 
 German Biblical scholar says, about the manuscripts of the 
 New Testament : " Providence has ordained for the New Testa- 
 ment more sources of the greatest antiquity than are possessed 
 by all the old Greek literature put together." 
 
 In one of his essays Lord Macaulay says of history : — 
 " Perfectly and absolutely true it cannot be : for to be per- 
 fectly and absolutely true, it ought to record all the slightest 
 particulars of the slightest transactions — all the things done, 
 and all the words uttered during the time of which it 
 treats. The omission of any circumstance, however insignifi- 
 cant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, 
 the Bodleian library would not contain the occurrences of a 
 week." And Lord Macaulay might have added that no 
 one would care to have such a mass of useless verbiage in 
 existence. He is surely wrong in saying that history is not 
 absolutely true simply because it does not give us all the par- 
 ticulars of the slightest transactions. Even in a court of 
 justice we do not think that a witness is not telling the 
 absolute truth because he does not relate every particular, 
 however insignificant, of the fact or conversation to which he
 
 6 
 
 deposes. And this leads me to consider the difference between 
 historical and judicial evidence. The late Sir George Cornewall 
 Lewis says in that most valuable and learned work, The 
 Credibility of the Early Roman History (Preface, p. 16), 
 " Historical evidence, like judicial evidence, is founded on the 
 testimony of credible witnesses. Unless those witnesses had 
 personal and immediate perception of the facts which they 
 report, unless they said and heard what they undertake to 
 relate as having happened, their evidence is not entitled to 
 credit. As all original witnesses must be contemporary with 
 the events which they attest, it is a necessary condition for the 
 credibility of a witness that he be a contemporary, though a 
 contemporary is not necessarily a credible witness. Unless, 
 therefore, a historical account can be traced by probable proof 
 to the testimony of contemporaries, the first condition of 
 credibility fails.^^ If, however, it is meant to be asserted that 
 the same degree of certainty ought to be required in historical 
 that is required in judicial evidence, it would be exacting too 
 much, and carrying scepticism too far. In the first place, 
 the thing is an impossibility, and the consequence would be, 
 that we should be logically compelled to withhold our belief 
 from nine-tenths of so-called historical facts about which we 
 have really no doubt at all. But, secondly, the circumstances 
 are wholly different. Judical inquiries relate to minute and 
 special facts in dispute, where two parties are opposed to each 
 other, and it is the duty and interest of both to adduce the best 
 evidence of which the thing to be proved is susceptible. And 
 in all civilized communities, their systems of jurisprudence lay 
 down technical rules of evidence — in some countries much 
 more strict than in others — which circumscribe the range of 
 proofs. For instance, in France, hearsay evidence is always 
 admitted ; in England it is always excluded. In some parts of 
 Germany a sort of arithmetical scale is applied to the testimony 
 of witnesses. Different countries apply different rules of legal 
 presumption, which arc really not instruments of truth, but 
 technical and positive modes of quieting controversy. But, to 
 quote the words of an eminent writer on the law of evidence, 
 ^' However widely different codes may varj^ from each other 
 in matters of arbitrary positive institution, and of mere artifi- 
 cial creation, the general means of investigating the truth of 
 contested facts must be common to all. Every rational system 
 which provides the means of proof must be founded on expe- 
 rience and reason, on a well-grounded knowledge of human 
 nature and conduct, on a consideration of the value of testi- 
 mony, and on the weight due to coincident circumstances.^^— 
 Starivie On the Law of Evidence (Preface),
 
 But history deals with general rather than particular facts 
 — with results rather than details — and from the nature and 
 necessity of the case must be content with looser modes of 
 proof than is necessary or expedient in judicial trials. All 
 that we are entitled to ask from her is such an amount of 
 evidence for the truth of the facts which she records as would 
 satisfy the understanding of a reasonable man in the ordinary 
 affairs of life. Every day we act upon evidence which^ if 
 offered in a court of justice, would be rejected. Too often we 
 act upon very slight and insufficient evidence, especially in 
 cases affecting the character of others ; but in so far as we do 
 this we act wrongly; and in the same manner we act wrongly 
 when we accept as true the mere statement of a historian on 
 any question where truth is of importance, when we have it in 
 our power to examine his authorities and judge of their value 
 for ourselves. 
 
 It is part of the constitution of human nature to confide 
 in the veracity of others. If this were not so, a man's belief 
 would be limited to matters within his own personal experience, 
 and no progress could be made in knowledge, nor would 
 improvement be possible. There is a tacit assumption, when 
 we yield to the force of oral evidence, of what I may call 
 the major premiss of our syllogism, viz., that men will generally 
 speak the truth. Experience teaches us, if indeed it is not 
 an intuitive impulse, to put faith in human testimony. 
 
 How beautiful is the trusting simplicity of childhood, and 
 the absolute reliance which a child places in the word of 
 its parents. But as we grow older this confidence is shaken, 
 and experience compels us to acquiesce in the truth of the 
 melancholy maxim of Lord Chatham, that " confidence is a 
 plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.'' That stern monitor 
 experience tells us that it by no means follows that because we 
 have contemporary testimony to a fact the fact is true. Wit- 
 nesses are often mistaken, and their evidence is not unfrequently 
 false. We must, therefore, so far as is possible, apply certain 
 rules by which to test the probability of its truth. I have 
 already alluded to one test of probability, and that is the 
 agreement of the fact with other facts known or admitted to be 
 true. Another test is the concurrence of the testimony of 
 independent witnesses, always supposing that each of thern has 
 had the means of knowing the fact or facts to be ascertained. 
 Of course I exclude all copying from the same original, and 
 this, perhaps, is implied in the word independent. As Arch- 
 bishop Whately has observed, 'Tor though in such a case 
 each of the witnesses should be considered as unworthy of 
 credit, and even much more likely to speak falsehood than
 
 8 
 
 truth, still the chances might be infinite against their all agree- 
 ing in the same falsehood^' (Rhetoric, pt.i. ch. ii. sec. 4). And 
 in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, Dr. Campbell says : " It 
 deserves likewise to be attended to on this subject, that in a 
 number of concurrent testimonies (in cases wherein there 
 could have been no previous concert) there is a probability dis- 
 tinct from that which may be termed the sum of the proba- 
 bilities resulting from the testimonies of the witnesses, a 
 probability which would remain even though the witnesses were 
 of such a character as to merit no faith at all. This proba- 
 bility arises purely from the concurrence itself. That such a 
 concurrence should spring from chance is as one to infinite ; 
 that is, in other words, morally impossible." Lord Mansfield 
 once said, with reference to the credit to be given to certain 
 reporters, '^It is objected that these are books of no autho- 
 rity, but if both the reporters were the worst that ever reported, 
 if substantially they report a case in the same way, it is demon- 
 stration of the truth of what they report or they could not 
 agree" (R. v. George, 1 Cowp. 16). 
 
 Generally speaking, the silence of contemporary writers as 
 to a fact throws strong suspicion on its genuineness. But this 
 test is not conclusive, for we may have overpowering evidence 
 aliunde of its truth. Lord Macaulay says : " We have read books 
 called histories of England under the reign of George II. in which 
 the rise of Methodism is not even mentioned." And Varnhagen 
 von Ense mentions in his Diary that Humboldt had adduced 
 " three important and perfectly undeniable matters of fact as to 
 which no evidence is to be found where it would be most anti- 
 cipated. In the archives of Barcelona no trace of the triumphal 
 entry of Columbus into that city ; in Marco Polo no allusion to 
 the Chinese Wall ; in the archives of Portugal nothing about 
 the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci in the service of that crown." 
 But notwithstanding this, the silence of contemporary authority 
 is one of the notes of falsehood with respect to an alleged his- 
 torical fact. How do we know that the story of William Tell 
 and his shooting an arrow at an apple on his son's head is 
 untrue ? Because we do not find it in contemporary history ; 
 and the first mention of it as a Swiss legend occurs in the chro- 
 nicle of Melchior Buss, registrar at Lucerne, some two hundred 
 years later. But, in addition, we find that the same story is 
 told in Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote in the twelfth century, of 
 a Danish hero ; a similar tale was current in Ireland ; and in 
 the Bilkinsaga it is told of the mythical Eigil, the brother of 
 Wieland, the smith. It also occurs in the legendary fables of 
 Holstein, Norway, and other countries; and although it is 
 impossible to trace the origin of the story, it is certain that no
 
 9 
 
 such occurrence happened in Switzerland. It is one of the 
 enfants trouves of historical literature, which can lay no claim 
 to legitimate paternity. 
 
 Why do we reject the story of the blind Belisarius begging 
 his bread in the streets of Constantinople ? Because Procopius, 
 who was a contemporary historian, and accompanied Belisarius 
 in his Eastern wars, in Africa, and in Italy, says nothing 
 in his account of the life and misfortunes of Justinian^s 
 famous general, of his blindness or beggary ; because no other 
 contemporary writer mentions them, and because the first hint 
 of them occurs in some Greek verses written by John Tzetzes, a 
 grammarian, about 600 years after the death of Belisarius. 
 Why do we not believe the fable of Pope J oan, whose accouche- 
 ment is said to have taken place in the midst of a procession 
 at Eome ? Because no contemporary author makes mention of 
 such an astounding occurrence, and we find the first allusion to 
 it in the Chronicon of Marianus Scotus, who lived two hundred 
 years afterwards. Even that passage is supposed to be an 
 interpolation, and the first author who really tells the story is 
 Stephen de Bourbon in the thirteenth century.' A not im- 
 probable explanation of it is that one of the Popes, who led 
 an immoral life, had a mistress named Joan, who had such 
 influence over him that she was called Papesse, and from this 
 the story had its origin. 
 
 Why do intelligent and well-educated men accept as true 
 the miracles of the New Testament, and reject as untrue the 
 legends of the Saints ? This is not the place, nor would it be 
 possible within the limits to which I must confine myself, to go 
 into the proofs of the miracles related in the Gospels and the 
 Acts. But briefly and summarily it may be said that we believe 
 them, — 1. Because they are recorded by eye-witnesses, who must 
 either have been the dupes of an imposture or the fabricators 
 of a falsehood. 2. They were done openly in the face of 
 enemies who, so far as we know, never denied them. 3. They 
 were done with an adequate motive and cause. 4. They serve 
 to explain the origin of a religion which has lasted for eighteen 
 centuries and won its way in spite of the fiercest opposition. 
 Now, applying these tests to the legends of the Saints, we find 
 that they fail in almost every particular ! Hardly any of them 
 rest on the testimony of eye-witnesses. They are almost 
 always isolated acts done in a corner, and not coram populo. 
 And the most famous of them, which is an exception to the 
 rule, I mean the cutting out of the roots of the tongues of a 
 number of Christians at Tipasa, who afterwards spoke articu- 
 lately and distinctly, has been shown by Mr. Twistleton in his 
 able work, The Tongue not Essential to Speech, to be no miracle
 
 10 
 
 at all, but perfectly explainable by natural causes. Moreover, 
 the mediaeval miracles are for the most part silly, unmeaning, 
 and childish, and they are often recorded by writers who lived 
 long after they are said to have occurred, who breathed an 
 atmosphere of credulity and were utterly destitute of the critical 
 faculty. Such considerations are quite sufficient to justify our 
 unbelief. If it is objected that intelligent Roman Catholics 
 believe them, we answer that they are the disciples of a sy^em 
 which forbids the right of private judgment on questions deter- 
 mined by the authority of the Church ; and we may well think 
 it easy for men who believe in the doctrines of the Immaculate 
 Conception and the Infallibility of the Pope, to believe also in 
 the winking of an image of the Virgin, the liquefaction of the 
 blood of St. Januarius, and the transportation through the air 
 of a house of the Virgin from Palestine to Loretto. Thus we 
 find a man of the intelligence of Dr. Newman saying: "Cruci- 
 fixes have bowed the head to the suppliant, and Madonnas have 
 bent their eyes on assembled crowds. St. Januarius^s blood 
 liquefies periodically at Naples, and St. Winifred's well is the 
 
 source of wonders even in an unbelieving country St. 
 
 Francis Xavier turned salt water into fresh for five hundred 
 travellers ; St. Raymond was transported over the sea on his 
 
 cloak ; St. Andrew shone brightly in the dark I need 
 
 not continue the catalogue. It is agreed on both sides ; the 
 two parties join issue over a fact — that fact is the claim of 
 miracles on the part of the Catholic Church. It is the Protes- 
 tant's charge, and it is our glory." 
 
 I may here in passing allude to the monstrous theory of 
 Strauss that the simple narratives in the four Gospels are mere 
 myths, which grew out of a body of belief which, somehow or 
 other, had taken possession of men's minds in the second 
 century of our era, and are no more real than the legends of 
 Theseus and Hercules. Our common sense ^-evolts against such 
 an absurdity, and if Strauss himself really believed it, it only 
 shows that no credulity can be greater or more childish than 
 the credulity of an infidel. 
 
 Why do we believe Thucydides and disbelieve Livy ? I 
 shall speak of both of these writers more fully hereafter, but 
 here I may say that we believe Thucydides because he was a 
 contemporary of the events which he relates ; he was himself 
 an actor in some of them : he had access to authentic informa- 
 tion, both oral and monumental, and we have no reason to 
 distrust his veracity. Of course I do not include the long 
 speeches he puts into the mouths of the characters he introduces, 
 for they are obviously manufactured, or, at all events, dressed 
 up for the occasion, according to a practice very common iu
 
 11 
 
 antiquity. We disbelieve a great part of the narrative of Livy 
 for the following reasons. We know that he could have had no 
 trustworthy authority for many of his statements respecting the 
 early history of Rome : some of those statements are intrinsi- 
 cally improbable, if not incredible : he lived centuries later 
 than many of the events which he records, and he had not the 
 critical faculty which enables an historian of the past, by a kind 
 of instinct, to separate the true from the false. To this I must 
 add the essentially Koman prejudice in favour of everything 
 that would tell in favour of the greatness and glory of Rome. 
 Hence his unfair account of the early wars of the Republic, 
 and the injustice with which he has treated Hannibal. 
 
 We believe the story of the Anabasis and Retreat of the 
 Ten Thousand, because the historian was the general who com- 
 manded the Greeks in that famous expedition ; but we reject 
 his fables about dreams, omens, and prophecies, because we 
 know that he was credulous about such things, and they were 
 not matters which came within the scope of his own personal 
 observation. 
 
 Our own early historians were as careless as tlieir readers 
 were credulous. King Lear, the son of Bladud, was accepted 
 as an historical personage ; and even Milton, in his History of 
 England, admits the fable " of Brutus and his line with the 
 whole progeny of kings to Julius Caesar," although it is impos- 
 sible not to see that he has little faith in it. But he says, 
 " certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom 
 I must follow ; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, 
 attested by ancient writers from books more ancient, I refuse 
 not as the due and proper subject of story." Now, why do we 
 refuse to believe the narrative ? Simply because, although it 
 may contain nothing " impossible or absurd," which is Milton^s 
 sole rule of exception, we know that the authors could not 
 possibly have had any authentic information about the facts 
 which they record. A child is as competent to write history as 
 a grown-up man, if the statements of preceding authors are 
 merely servilely copied, and no critical examination is made 
 of the sources of their authority and the means they had of 
 ascertaining the truth. 
 
 Dates are often of the utmost importance in verifying 
 historical facts, but the dates themselves are sometimes uncer- 
 tain. In Grecian history the general custom was to reckon by 
 the year of the Olympiad, and therefore it is essential to know 
 the date of the first year of the first Olympiad. Now, how do 
 we ascertain this ? If you will look into Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, 
 p. 150, you will see that it is taken to correspond with 77^ b.c, 
 and this is proved by a curious consensus of authorities. The
 
 12 
 
 games were celebrated at intervals of four years, and if we know 
 independently the exact date of an event, and find it placed in 
 the particular year of a particular Olympiad, we can, by reckon- 
 ing backwards, ascertain accurately the date of the first. For 
 instance, we know, from contemporary or other evidence, that 
 the consulships of C. Pompeius Gallus and Q. Verannius, at 
 Rome, coincided with the first year of the 207th Olympiad, and 
 we know the year of the Christian era of those consulships : this 
 was the year a.d. 49. Now, 206 Olympiads or 824 years had 
 elapsed since the beginning of the first, and this gives the year 
 B.C. 776 as its date. 
 
 It is no doubt difficult to invent wholly so-called historical 
 facts, which, if closely compared with known contemporaneous 
 occurrences and ascertained dates, may not be shown to be 
 false. But it is often still more difficult to find the material 
 for such criticism. Oblivion may have swallowed up the records 
 of the past, and then the only tests we can apply are the inherent 
 probability or improbability of the alleged facts, their consist- 
 ency or inconsistency with themselves, and our knowledge of 
 the means which the writer possessed of being acquainted with 
 their truth. I have already pointed out the untrust worthiness 
 of historical statements first made by authors who lived long 
 after the events which they record. And I have also shown 
 that it is by no means altogether safe to gauge the credibility 
 of a fact by its agreement or disagreement with probability ; 
 but as regards the test supplied by the means of comparing 
 historical allegations with other historical facts which have been 
 sufficiently proved, some of the most brilliant triumphs of 
 criticism have been won by applying it. My time is too limited 
 to allow me to adduce more than one or two specimens of this, 
 and I think I cannot do better than cite that splendid example 
 of scholarship and criticism, Bentley's Dissertation on the 
 Genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris, The history of its 
 authorship is this. About the year 1690, Sir William Temple 
 published an essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, in 
 which he maintained the superiority of thp ancients. And in 
 support of his position, " that the oldest books we have are still 
 in their kind the best,'' he adduced the '' Fables of iEsop'' and 
 the "Epistles of Phalaris." This attracted attention to the 
 epistles, and a new edition of them was given to the world by 
 the Hon. Charles Boyle; and then Bentley published his Dis- 
 sertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, the object being to prove 
 that they were spurious. I may mention, in passing, that 
 an amusing parody of the original controversy between the 
 respective champions of ancient and modern learning was 
 written by Swift, called " The Battle of the Books.'' It may 
 be interesting to point out some of the proofs by which Bentley
 
 13 
 
 for ever destroyed the credit which had been given to these 
 epistles : — 
 
 (1.) He shows that in them Phalaris speaks of borrowing 
 money from the inhabitants of a town in Sicily nearly 
 three centuries before that town was built. 
 (2.) Phalaris is represented as giving to the physician a 
 present of cups, called by the name of a Corinthian 
 potter who lived more than a hundred years after 
 Phalaris' death. 
 (3.) Phalaris speaks of Zancle and Messene as distinct 
 towns, whereas, in truth, Zancle was merely the ancient 
 name of Messene. 
 (4.) In one of his letters, Phalaris addresses Pythagoras as 
 a philosopher, and speaks of his system of philosophy, 
 whereas we know that Pythagoras first called himself 
 a philo-sophos, or lover of wisdom, when Leon of 
 Sicyon asked him what he was. And it is impossible 
 to believe that the term was in vogue, or even known 
 to Phalaris, who, when he wrote the letter, had never 
 seen Pythagoras. 
 (5.) Phalaris is very angry with Aristolochus for writing 
 tragedies against him at a time when the word tragedy 
 was utterly unknown. 
 (6.) Phalaris writes in Attic Greek, whereas, as a Sicilian, 
 
 his dialect would have been Doric. 
 Let me illustrate this kind of criticism by a different 
 example. On the Monte Cavallo — the old Quirinal Hill, at 
 Rome — stand two colossal statues of horses, called "Colossi di 
 Monte Cavallo." Under one pedestal are, or were, inscribed 
 the words Opus Phiclice, under the other Opus Praxitelis. But 
 formerly there were two more elaborate inscriptions, one to the 
 effect that Phidias had here sculptured Bucephalus, the horse 
 of Alexander the Great ; and the other that Praxiteles, in com- 
 petition with Phidias, had sculptured another figure of the 
 same horse, Bucephalus. Now Phidias died somewhere about 
 432 B.C. Praxiteles flourished in 364 b.c, nearly a century 
 later, and Alexander the Great was not born until 356 b.c 
 This was too much for even the credulity of a bygone genera- 
 tion, and Pope Urban VIII. effaced the inscriptions, and sub- 
 stituted for them the simple words Opus Phidia and Opus 
 Praxitelis, which had at all events the merit of not being guilty 
 of a palpable anachronism, although each is most probably abso- 
 lutely untrue. But such an anachronism is not quite so bad as 
 that of the writer in a feuilleton of the Constitutionnel (supposed 
 to have been Lamartine), who says, " The tombs of great 
 poets inspire great passions. It was at Tasso's tomb that 
 Petrarch nourished his respectful remembrance of Laura ! '^
 
 14 
 
 Now, Petrarch died in 1374, and Tasso published his Gerusa- 
 lemme Liberata in 1581 ! 
 
 This is very different from any argument against the 
 genuineness of a fact founded merely on discrepancies of state- 
 ment. A curious instance of this occurs in the accounts 
 given of the execution of the Earl of Argyle in 1661. Claren- 
 don says that he was condemned to be hanged, and executed. 
 Burnet and Echard say that he was beheaded. This has been 
 made use of by Paley, in his Evidences of the Christian Reli- 
 gion, with reference to the variance in the statements of the 
 Evangelists as to the circumstances of the Crucifixion. No 
 one doubts that Argyle was executed, which is the important 
 fact; and there would be still less reason to doubt the fact 
 of the Crucifixion, however the Evangelists may differ in minute 
 details. It is, of course, a difficulty in the way of those who 
 assert the literal and verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, but 
 that is a subject foreign to my purpose, and too large to be 
 dealt with by a passing notice in such an address as this. 
 
 It is a strange paradox that the belief of some writers 
 and many readers seems to increase in the inverse ratio of the 
 probabilities of the case. How else can we account for the 
 fact that the more history recedes into the darkness of the past, 
 bold statements are received with unquestioning credulitj^ 
 Thus Dr. Hales in his work on chronology assures us that the 
 thirty reigns of the Athenian kings and archons from Cecrops 
 to Creon, form ^^one of the most authentic and correct docu- 
 ments to be found in the whole range of profane chronology," 
 — the truth being that the reigns of the kings are little better 
 than fabulous ; and Bunsen, in his Egypfs Place in ' Universal 
 History, undertakes to reconstruct the authentic chronology 
 of Egypt for a period of nearly 4,000 years before Christ, 
 and ''to restore to the ancient history of the world the 
 vital energy of which it has been so long deprived," although 
 his chief authorities, independently of some monumental 
 inscriptions, are Eratosthenes and Manetho, writers who lived 
 more than 3,000 years after the period which they are sup- 
 posed to authenticate. Now Manetho composed his history 
 from two sources, temple registers and popular legends. I need 
 say nothing about the latter, but what possible ground have we 
 for believing that their priest-kept registers contained true 
 accounts of events that happened thirty or forty centuries before 
 the historian inspected them? Eratosthenes, at the request of 
 Ptolemy, drew up a list of thirty-eight Theban kings, occupying 
 a period of more than a thousand years : and it is sufficient to saj^ 
 with Mr. Grote that he " delivered positive opinions upon a 
 point on which no sufficient data was accessible, and therefore
 
 15 
 
 was not a guide to be followed. History thus written is 
 nothing but clever guess-work, and amounts to no more than 
 plausible conjecture, in which the chances are almost infinite 
 that the narrative is, if not wholly, at least materially wrong. 
 As the speculation of an ingenious mind it may be interesting, 
 but as a record of facts it is worthless.^^ 
 
 In his essay on the uncertainty of the history of the 
 first four centuries of Rome, in the Memoirs of the Academy 
 of Inscriptions, tome vi. p. 71, M. de Pouilly says: — " History 
 is the narrative of a fact which we derive from those whom 
 we know to have been witnesses of it. It results from 
 this definition that for a history to be authentic its author, or at 
 all events the person on whose narrative it is based, must have 
 lived at the time when the events happened.^^ And the same 
 writer adds, '^ Tradition is a popular rumour of which the source 
 is not known. It is a chain of which we hold one end, but the 
 other is lost in the abysmal depths of the past.^^ 
 
 To show the danger of trusting to tradition, I may take 
 as an illustration the amusing game called " Russian Scandal," 
 where a party being seated together in a row, a person 
 at one end whispers some story into the ear of his neigh- 
 bour, who repeats it in the same manner to the one next 
 to him, and so on until it comes to the last, wKb tells aloud 
 what he has heard. It will be generally found that the 
 story thus transmitted varies essentially from the story as 
 originally told, and the experience of every one as to the gossip 
 of society teaches the same lesson. Laplace, in his Essai 
 Philosopiiique sur les Probabilites, has made this the subject 
 of a mathematical calculation. He says, " Suppose a fact to 
 be transmitted through twenty persons; the first communi- 
 cating it to the second, the second to the third, &c., and 
 let the probability of each testimony be expressed by nine- 
 tenths (that is, suppose that of ten reports made by each 
 witness nine only are true), then at every time the story 
 passes from one witness to another the evidence is reduced 
 to nine-tenths of what it was before. Thus, after it has passed 
 through the whole twenty, the evidence will be found to be 
 less than one-eighth.'^ 
 
 But belief by no means depends upon actual testimony. 
 We believe in the results of mathematical inquiry by reasoning. 
 We believe in the existence of a Creator by arguments drawn 
 from design and other considerations. We may or may not 
 believe that the planets are inhabited from arguments drawn 
 from analogy. We believe many other facts from their inherent 
 probability, and so on. But in many such cases it would be 
 more proper to speak of our persuasion than our belief, by
 
 16 
 
 which I mean, that our minds stop short of full conviction ; but 
 on weighing the evidence or arguments on both sides in oppo- 
 site scales, we see that the balance inclines one way more than 
 the other, and therefore we are disposed to think that such and 
 such a proposition is true. This applies to many of the dis- 
 puted facts of history. In his Grammar of Assent ^ in order to 
 show that certitude is the result of arguments which, taken in 
 the letter, and not in their full implicit sense, are but proba- 
 bilities, Newman takes the case of the following propositions : — 
 (1.) That we are absolutely certain that Great Britain is an 
 island. But how do we know this ? Those who have 
 actually circumnavigated the country have a right to 
 be certain ; but which of us has done this, and which 
 of us has even met with any one who tells us that he 
 has done it ? Newman shows by the common argu- 
 ments that there would be a manifest reductio ad 
 absurdum attached to the notion that we can be 
 deceived on such a point as this, but at the same time 
 that we are satisfied with proof which is not of the 
 highest kind possible. 
 (2.) He takes the question of the authorship of the iEneid, 
 the plays attributed to Terence, and the so-called his- 
 tories of Livy and of Tacitus, which the Abbe Har- 
 douin maintained were the forgeries of the monks of 
 the thirteenth century. We must not forget that our 
 knowledge of the ancient classics comes entirely from 
 mediaeval copies of them made by monks from manu- 
 scripts which now no longer exist. How do we know 
 that some of these so-called copies were not actual 
 forgeries ? ^ The strongest argument against such a 
 supposition is our disbelief in the ability of mediaeval 
 monks to produce such works; and Newman says, 
 justly enough, that an instinctive sense of this and a 
 faith in testimony are the sufficient but undeveloped 
 argument on which to ground our certitude. To 
 faith in testimony we must add the^ absence of dissen- 
 tient claims, and this will be found to be one of the 
 most cogent reasons for our belief. 
 (3.) Newman asks, What are my grounds for thinking that 
 I, in my particular case, shall die ? What is the dis- 
 tinct evidence on which I allow myself to be certain ? 
 Death to me is a future event. How do I know 
 that, because all past generations have died, the same 
 
 * " To forge and counterfeit books and father them upon great names has 
 been a practice almost as old as letters." — Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris.
 
 17 
 
 law must hold with regard to myself or others ? He 
 says, that the strongest proof I have for my inevitable 
 mortaUty is the reductio ad absurdum ; but I think 
 that here he is mistaken that there is reductio ad 
 absurdum, in the proper sense of the term, in the 
 belief that I shall never die, although we may 
 admit, with Newman, that there is a surplusage of 
 belief over proof when I determine that I individually 
 must die. 
 In that very clever and amusing jeu d'esprit by Arch- 
 bishop Whately, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buotia- 
 parte, he has shown that logically we are not justified in 
 believing that such a person as the first Emperor of the 
 French ever existed. To state such a proposition seems to 
 carry with it its own refutation, but the mock-serious argument 
 of the Archbishop is sustained with wonderful skill and ability. 
 His object, of course, was to show that the kind of reasoning by 
 which infidels attempt to shake our faith in the narrative of 
 Scripture ought equally to shake our belief in the existence of 
 the first Napoleon. 
 
 I will now say a few words about the father of history, 
 Herodotus, and briefly compare him with Thucydides. 
 
 In his Literature of Greece, Colonel Mure calls *Herodotus 
 '' an essentially honest and veracious historian,'-' and says that, 
 " rigid, in fact, as has been the scrutiny to which his text 
 has been subjected, no distinct case of wilful misstatement 
 or perversion of fact has been substantiated against him." 
 Now what were the materials which Herodotus had for com- 
 posing his history ? They were (1.) previous histories ; (2.) 
 monumental records preserved in national repositories and 
 religious sanctuaries or places of public resort. He himself 
 quotes only one older historian, Hecatseus of Miletus, but 
 several others had written before him, such as CEgeon of Samos, 
 Biou, and Deiochus of Proconnesus, Endemus of Paros, Charon 
 of Lampsacus and Pherecydes of Leros. We do not, however, 
 know that Herodotus really had access to copies of their manu- 
 scripts, which would have been written on papyri, and must 
 have been few and costly. He was a great traveller and a 
 diligent inquirer, and obtained a considerable part of his infor- 
 mation from what he saw with his own eyes, and heard from 
 persons acquainted with the facts. He tells us that he sifted 
 and compared conflicting statements, and he often rejected 
 stories which he did not think he had warrant for believing. 
 But it is curious that in some cases his scepticism is now known 
 to have been wrong. Thus he disbelieves the story of the circum- 
 navigation of Africa by the Phoenicians in the seventh century 
 (8) f
 
 18 
 
 before our era^ on account of the marvel related by the voyagers^ 
 that as they sailed " they had the sun on their right/' which is 
 the strongest possible confirmation of the truth of the account. 
 He cautiously doubts the existence of an amber-yielding district 
 on the Northern Sea, and of any islands called Cassiterides, 
 from which tin was said to be brought. But we know that 
 amber is found on the shores of the Baltic, and that the Cassi- 
 terides were our own Scilly Islands. Some of his statements, 
 which were formerly regarded as impossible or incredible 
 marvels, have, by the progress of later discovery, been proved to 
 be true. Such are his accounts of a race of men dwelling 
 upon scaffoldings in Lake Prasias and living upon fish (v. 16), 
 in fact, Lacustrians; of a breed of sheep in Arabia with such 
 long tails that they were supported on trucks to preserve them 
 from injury (iii. 13), as is the case in North Africa, and, I 
 believe, in some parts of Spain at the present day. And to 
 show that he is by no means the gobemouche that he is some- 
 times represented, I may instance what he says of the Arim- 
 aspians, a one-eyed race, who stole gold from the griffins, whom 
 Milton thus mentions : — 
 
 "As when a gryfon in the wilderness, 
 With winged course o'er hill or moory dale, 
 Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth, 
 And from his wakeful custody purloined 
 The guarded gold." 
 
 Herodotus says that he cannot persuade himself to believe the 
 story, giving the sensible reason that there cannot be araceof men 
 with one eye, who in all things else resemble the rest of mankind. 
 The value of Thucydides as a historian depends first on 
 our faith in his honesty, and secondly on the fact that he had 
 access to contemporary testimony both oral and monumental. 
 He was born about twenty-five years before the outbreak of the 
 Peloponnesian war, and he took part in some of its events ; but 
 he most chiefly relied for information on the statements of 
 others who had themselves been actors in the scenes that they 
 described. He sometimes quotes inscriptions on monuments 
 (i. 132-134), and letters, and despatches (iv.^50; vii. 8; viii. 50), 
 of which he had no doubt seen the originals or copies. He clearly 
 was a man of sound judgment and great intelligence. Upon 
 the whole we have as good reason for believing the history of 
 Thucydides as we have for believing any other profane author ; 
 but, as I have before observed, we are not to suppose that the 
 long speeches which he puts into the mouths of Pericles and 
 others were spoken as he reports them. * They are rather forms 
 of stating the arguments on both sides^ such as Thucydides 
 understood them.
 
 19 
 
 Until a comparatively recent period the history of Rome, 
 as told by Livy, was implicitly believed ; and as much credit 
 was given to his account of the regal government of Rome as 
 to the annals of the empire by Tacitus, a contemporary writer. 
 Machiavel, inhh Discourses on the First Decade o/Livy, accepts 
 the story of the twelve kings as not less real than the story 
 of the lives of the twelve Caesars. 
 
 The first scholar who seems to have questioned the truth 
 of the old narrative about Rome was Cluverius (a Latinized 
 name for Philip Cluver, who was born in Dantzic in 1580). He 
 published, in 1624, a book called Italia Antiqua, in which he 
 expressed his opinion that Roman history before the capture of 
 the city by the Gauls was all uncertain ; and he rejected the 
 account of Trojan settlement, in Latium, the Alban dynasty, 
 and the story of the foundation of Rome by Romulus. Others 
 followed in the same track ; I may mention Bochart, and Peri- 
 zonius, and Pouilly, until at last the subject received an exhaus- 
 tive examination in the remarkable work of Beaufort, a Prench 
 Protestant refugee, who published at Utrecht, in 1738, his 
 Dissertation sur Flncertitude des Cinq Premiers Siecles de mis- 
 toire Romaine. 
 
 Beaufort is entitled to the honour of ranking as the 
 pioneer of a new school of criticism ; but it was »ot until the 
 publication of Niebuhr's History of Rome, in 1811-12, that the 
 subject attracted the attention it deserved. This work may be 
 said to have revolutionized the world of thought in relation to 
 Roman history. Its destructive power is irresistible, but its 
 constructive power is very different. I will not say that Niebuhr 
 endeavoured to evolve a history of Rome out of his own con- 
 sciousness — like the famous story of the camel evolved by one of 
 his countrymen — but he certainly trusted a great deal too much 
 to sagacity of conjecture, which he dignified by the title of '^ dis- 
 covery.^^ He even goes so far as to liken his faculty in that 
 respect to the power of divination — the fiavrda of the Greeks 
 (vol. iii. p. 318). But it is one thing for a Cuvier or an Owen 
 to build up the form of an animal from a single bone, and 
 another for a historian to presume to construct a narrative 
 of the distant past from a few isolated hints, or even isolated 
 facts. In the animal form there is a correlation of parts, and 
 a law of typical conformity, which enables the anatomist to 
 ascend with almost unerring certainty from bone to limb, and 
 from limb to body, and to clothe the body with its proper in- 
 teguments, until we can see by the eye of imagination the very 
 form that has ceased to exist upon the earth for perhaps millions 
 of years. But such an induction is not possible in the case 
 of human afi*airs and human actions ; variwn et mutabile semper 
 
 c2
 
 20 
 
 would be their appropriate motto, and the events that actually 
 happen often verify the saying that truth is stranger than 
 fiction. 
 
 There is an old Scotch proverb, "Give a romancer a hair 
 and he will make a tether of it," and this applies to a certain 
 school of writers of history. Out of a scrap of prose or a line 
 of verse, or a broken fragment of an inscription, they will, by 
 the aid of an active imagination, construct whole pages of nar- 
 rative. The character of a people and the state of its society 
 will be inferred from a few lines which may, when they were 
 written, have been quite untrue, or mere satire, or a gross 
 exaggeration. The historian in modern times who has been 
 most conspicuous for the use of such materials is Lord Macaulay. 
 The result is, that not consciously but inevitably truth is sa- 
 crificed to effect. I will mention two instances of this — his 
 account of the Highlands, and his account of the state of the 
 English clergy in the seventeenth century. 
 
 It is not pleasant to detract from the merit of a work of 
 such brilliancy as Lord Macaulay ^s History, but it is impossible 
 not to see that he has been misled into many great mistakes. 
 I speak not now of his almost bitter hatred of the Duke of 
 Marlborough, which induces him to paint his character in the 
 blackest colours, and his almost idolatrous admiration of 
 William III., which induces him to palliate all his faults, even 
 that of faithlessness to his wife ; but I allude to specific facts, 
 in which the historian has been shown to be utterly wrong, and 
 I would recommend those who doubt it to read the New Examen, 
 by Mr. Paget (London, 1861), in which the author has, with 
 admirable acumen, instituted " an inquiry into the evidence 
 relating to certain passages in Lord Macaulay^s History." He 
 has shown, I think satisfactorily, that Lord Macaulay has been 
 inaccurate and unjust in his account of the execution by 
 Claverhouse, of Brown, the so-called Christian carrier ; that he 
 has confounded William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, 
 with a George Penn, in describing a disreputable transaction 
 relative to the maids of Taunton ; and that he is mistaken in 
 several other matters of fact. 
 
 I have often thought how strangely history would have 
 to be rewritten, if we could summon from the world of spirits 
 those who were the chief actors in many of the events which it 
 records, and obtain from them a true version of such events. 
 How many motives would then be disclosed of which we now 
 know nothing ! How many inferences would be shown to be 
 erroneous ! How many facts would be altered in their com- 
 plexion ! And yet, in fairness, I ought to mention, how seldom 
 it has happened that popular verdicts, with respect to the
 
 21 
 
 characters and events of history, have been proved to be wrong 
 by subsequent researches. I may instance the attempts that 
 have been made of late years to whitewash the characters of 
 Tiberius, Henry VIII., and Robespierre, all of which seem to 
 have signally failed. 
 
 Amongst other questions we should like to be able to put 
 to satisfy our curiosity, I may select almost at random the 
 following. 
 
 Who were the Pelasgians and whence came the Etrurians ? 
 
 Was there a real war of Troy, and what were the facts ? 
 
 Did Demosthenes receive any part of the money given up by 
 Harpalus when he was arrested at Athens ? 
 
 Who was the real founder of Rome ? 
 
 What was the origin of the story that the Laws of the 
 Twelve Tables were the result of a mission sent from Rome into 
 Greece in the fifth century before Christ ? 
 
 What authority had Suetonius for nine-tenths of the 
 gossiping anecdotes contained in his Lives of the Twelve 
 Caesars ? 
 
 Was St. Peter ever Bishop of Rome ? Beyond mere tradition 
 there is no evidence that the Apostle ever even visited that 
 city, much less that he was Bishop of it. Let those who 
 assert the contrary refute, if they can, the facts anS arguments 
 of Barrow, in his " Treatise on the Pope's Supremacy .'' And 
 yet, how much of the tt aching of the Roman Catholic Church 
 depends upon the assumption that St. Peter was the first bishop 
 of Rome, and that the Popes are his legitimate successors ! 
 
 Was Petrarch's Laura a living creature of flesh and blood 
 or a mere poetical myth ? 
 
 What was the real character of Richard III., and is it true 
 that he was accessory to the murder of the Princes in the 
 Tower, if murdered they were ? 
 
 Horace Walpole concludes his ingenious essay called " His- 
 toric Doubts in the Life and Reign of King Richard III.'' in 
 the following words : — ^' We must leave this whole story dark, 
 though not near so dark as we found it ; and it is, perhaps, as 
 wise to be uncertain in one portion of our history as to believe 
 so much as is believed in all histories, though very probably as 
 falsely delivered to us, as the period which we have here been 
 examining." 
 
 What were the real facts of the Gowrie conspiracy in 
 Scotland ? 
 
 Did Mary Queen of Scots really write the letters to 
 Bothwell which were produced from a silver casket before the 
 Commissioners at Westminster, and which, if genuine, establish 
 the fact of her being accessory to the murder of Darnley ?
 
 99 
 
 Was Anne Boleyn guilty of the charges brought against her 
 by Henry VIII. ? Mr. Fjoude has laboured to prove that she 
 was^ but his arguments are very far from convincing. 
 
 What was the real cause why James I. spared the life of 
 the Earl of Southampton, after his conviction of the murder of 
 Sir Thomas Overbury ? 
 
 Who was the man in the Iron Mask ? Who wrote the 
 letters of Junius ? 
 
 It is extraordinary how few of the anecdotes which pass 
 current in literature will bear the test of critical inquiry, and 
 the result of a careful investigation of the evidence is apt to 
 dispose the mind to general scepticism on such subjects. Let 
 me mention a few instances which will serve to enliven what 
 otherwise, I fear, has been rather a dull discourse. 
 
 The first I shall mention is not an anecdote, but a so-called 
 historical fact. 
 
 We find it stated in Lempriere's Classical Dictionary that 
 the army which Xerxes led into Greece consisted of upwards of 
 five million souls, and he says that " the multitude which the 
 fidelity of historians has not exaggerated was stopped at Ther- 
 mopylse by 300 Spartans under King Leonidas." The thing is 
 simply impossible, and therefore incredible, unless we adopt the 
 maxim of Tertullian, and say. Credo quia impossibile est. 
 
 The story of Canute commanding the waves to advance 
 no farther first appears in Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote 
 a century after the Danish king. The legend of Fair Rosa- 
 mond is treated by Hume as fabulous ; and the greatest suspi- 
 cion rests on the account of St. Pierre and his companions 
 delivering up the keys of Calais to Edward III., with halters 
 round their necks, and having their lives spared at the inter- 
 cession of the Queen. The popular story of the origin of the 
 Order of the Garter, as owing to the accident that happened 
 to the Countess of Salisbury when dancing at the court of 
 Edward III., is first mentioned by Polydore Virgil, who wrote 
 200 years later. In his Lives of the Judges, Mr. Foss has 
 shown that the story of the re-appointmelit of Sir William 
 Gascoigne as Chief Justice, by Henry V., who, when Prince of 
 Wales, had been committed by him to prison for an assault, is 
 the reverse of true, for it seems that Henry V. actually deprived 
 him of the ofiice of Chief Justice a few days after his accession 
 to the throne. The interesting story that Cromwell, Hampden, 
 and Hazelrig had actually embarked for New England in 1638, 
 prepared to abandon the country for ever, when they were 
 stopped by an Order in Council, has been proved to have no 
 foundation in fact. 
 
 The celebrated phrase attributed to Francis I. after the
 
 23 
 
 battle of Pavia, Tout est ;perdu fors Vhonmur, turns out to have 
 been Vlionneur et la vie qui est saulve, which deprives it of all 
 its point. As to the story of the chivalrous interchange of 
 courtesies between the English and French guards at the battle 
 of Fontenoy, " Monsieur, bid your men fire/^ '' No, sir, we 
 never fire first/' — Carlyle says, in his Life of Frederick the 
 Great (vol. iv. p. 119), '^ It is almost a pity to disturb an 
 elegant historical passage of this, kind circulating round the 
 world in some glory for a century past ; but there has a 
 small irrefragable document come to me which modifies it a 
 good deal, and reduces matters to the business form." This 
 document is a letter from Lord Charles Hay, lieutenant- 
 colonel of the Guards, written or dictated about three weeks 
 after the battle, and giving an account of what happened. In 
 this no mention is made of the occurrence, and we may confi- 
 dently believe with Carlyle, that " the French mess-rooms (with 
 their eloquent talent that way) had rounded off the thing into 
 the current epigrammatic redaction." 
 
 We all know how French historians, including M. Thiers, 
 repeat' the story of Le Vengeur refusing to strike her flag in 
 the action of the 1st of June, 1794, and going down into the 
 depths of the ocean while her crew shouted Vive la Bepuhlique ! 
 This has been shown by Admiral Griffiths, who Ivas living in 
 1838, one of the few survivors of the engagement, and who 
 wrote a letter on the subject, to be as he calls it " a ridi- 
 culous piece of nonsense." When the Vengeur sank, the action 
 had ceased for some time. She had been taken possession of by 
 the boats of the Culloden ; and as to the crew. Admiral Grif- 
 fiths says, "never were men in distress more ready to save 
 themselves." There was "not one shout beyond that of horror 
 and despair." And yet the lie will live in the annals of French 
 heroism, and will perhaps be believed to the end of time. — See 
 Carlyle' s Essays, vol. v. pp. 356-359. 
 
 Before I conclude I will, with reference to the special 
 objects of this Institute, state in as terse a form as possible the 
 reasons why we are justified in believing on historical grounds 
 the truth of the narratives in the New Testament, excluding all 
 consideration of its doctrines : — 
 
 (1.) The contemporary nature of the testimony. 
 
 (2.) The artlessness and apparent truthfulness of the writers. 
 
 (3.) The substantial agreement, together with the circum- 
 stantial variety of the statements, of four different 
 contemporary eye-witnesses. 
 
 (4.) The undesigned coincidences which exist between the 
 Gospels and Acts on the one hand and the Epistles 
 on the other.
 
 24 
 
 (5.) The absence of any conceivable motive for fraud or 
 falsehood. 
 
 (6.) The difficulty, if not the absurdity, of supposing that 
 the teachers of the purest morality should be engaged 
 in the immoral work of propagating an imposture and 
 forging documents. 
 
 (7.) The utter absence of any contradiction to their state- 
 ments during the first four centuries. 
 
 (8.) The frequent reference to the words of the four Evan- 
 gelists by writers who lived in the first two centuries, 
 showing that their narratives were then current and 
 well known. 
 
 (9.) The adequacy of the cause for miraculous interposition, 
 if we believe in a benevolent Creator and in the 
 immortality of the soul. 
 (10.) The sufficiency of the accounts to explain the pheno- 
 menon of Christianity as a religion which now exists 
 in the world, whereas no other theory has or can 
 explain it. 
 
 If these be not sufficient grounds for believing the truth 
 of the accounts that have come down to us, I know not any 
 historical fact which we are justified in believing. 
 
 The Chairman. — I am sure I may offer to Mr. Forsyth the thanks of the 
 meeting for the very interesting and learned paper which he has read. 
 We shall now be happy to hear the remarks which any one present may 
 have to offer upon the subject of the paper. 
 
 The Eev. G. Currey, D.D. — Perhaps I may be allowed to offer some 
 opinions at which I have arrived, for I have had the opportunity of reading 
 the paper before I came here, which of course places me in a better posi- 
 tion for commenting upon it than if I had merely heard it read for the first 
 time in this room. I will not waste the time of the meeting by expressing 
 my opinion on the general merits of the paper, or by pointing out those 
 parts of it which I think are deserving of praise. In such a meeting as 
 this, it should rather be the part of those who spe^k to see if there be 
 anything which may strike them as defective, in order to give the author, 
 in replying, an opportunity of supplying any such defects, or of showing to 
 objectors that they really have no existence. I would say, then, that my 
 first impression on reading this paper was rather a melancholy one ; for it 
 seemed to tell me very much that I was not to believe, and to leave very 
 little which I was justified in believing. That is the main point which I 
 have to bring forward, and I shall be very glad if the author in his reply 
 will show that I was wrong in entertaining this impression. I am thankful 
 to see that he has not failed to explain the grounds upon which the evidence 
 for Holy Scripture rests. On that point we can have no difference of
 
 25 
 
 opinion, but shall all acknowledge the clear and distinct manner in which 
 the author has set forth our belief in the historical facts detailed in our 
 Scripture history. (Cheers.) But, apart from this, I must say that there 
 is left but little for us to believe, nor does it appear to me that the rules of 
 evidence, as applicable to the credibility of history, have been as clearly 
 drawn up in this paper as I might have desired. I should have preferred 
 seeing them in a more distinct and clear, and perhaps tabulated form, in 
 order that I might apply those rules to any particular case, or to any parti- 
 cular historian, in order to ascertain the credibility of the fact which I was 
 considering, or of the historian whom I was examining. There appears to 
 be in that respect, a want of clearness, owing, probably, to the scantiness 
 of information adducible on the numerous topics introduced by way of 
 illustration. One of the reasons which leaves this impression on my mind 
 is, that the greater part of the paper is occupied in showing what we 
 should not believe, and because there is a certain confusion between the 
 leading facts of history, and smaller incidents contained in anecdotes, 
 sometimes of a slight though interesting character. The laws of evidence 
 indeed may be unalterable, but there is a difference in their application to 
 anecdotes and to the more important facts of history. Many of these 
 anecdotes, we are told, are not to be believed in at all, and it seems to me 
 that in a paper in which we hope to find rules laid down to point out what 
 we should believe, too much space has been given up to the introduction of 
 trivial anecdotes which we are not to believe. We know that, as time 
 goes on, small anecdotes, worthy of our attention as amusing or beautiful 
 stories, but not to be accepted as claimants to the dignity of history, 
 gather round great acts. Several of the anecdotes which have been given 
 to-night seem to me to be of this kind, and appear to have been brought 
 forward in order to be rejected. They are simply illustrations of what few 
 will deny, that much of history, commonly so-called, is not to be received 
 without question. I would separate anecdotes from the consideration of a 
 subject of this kind. They are too apt to become like the fringe described 
 in that well-known story, the " Tale of a Tub," where a coat is represented 
 as being decorated with such a quantity of fringe, that the original 
 material is altogether hidden by the superfluous mass of adornment. You 
 will remember how one of the brothers carefully took off the fringe without 
 injuring the coat, but the other tore it off with so much vehemence that 
 he rent the coat as well. In the same way, when we are disposing of 
 anecdotes, we should take care not to lose sight of the historical truth which 
 lies underneath. With regard to the story of William TelFs shooting at an 
 apple placed upon his son's head, I reject it, not simply because it 
 appeared for the first time many years after the occurrence itself was alleged to 
 have taken place, but also because, as Mr. Forsyth has pointed out, it appears 
 in connection with other persons and other countries. But Avhilel reject the 
 story of the apple, it does not follow that I reject the story of the fact 
 that William Tell arose as an heroic defender of liberty to rescue his country 
 from the oppression of a foreign yoke ; this is the great historical fact that
 
 26 
 
 lies underneath the story of the apple, and the rejection of the anecdote 
 need not affect the historical fact. It is of great importance that we should 
 put aside those parts of history which form merely the adornments of its 
 earlier days. We know that former ages were far less critical than the 
 present, and that anecdotes then formed a considerable part of history. 
 But we can dispense with many of these anecdotes without losing the 
 substantial facts. I would, therefore, lay stress upon the difference between 
 anecdote and history. Mr. Forsyth has introduced into his paper certain 
 passages from Dr. Newman's Grammar of Assent; but, with regard to 
 them, it seems to me that we ought to draw a distinction between 
 assent to the statements of history and to propositions relating to natural 
 phenomena ; the grounds, for instance, on which we believe that the sun 
 will rise to-morrow, or on which we believe we shall die. I do not consider 
 that such questions bear very much on the laws of evidence as appli- 
 cable to the credibility of history, and I cannot but think that the intro- 
 duction of these passages from Dr. Newman's Grammar of Assent tends to 
 confuse our aj^prehension of the laws of evidence with regard to history. 
 These laws need to be clearly stated. The first ground of our belief in 
 history must be, the evidence of contemporaries, as stated by Sir George 
 Cornewall Lewis in a passage which Mr. Forsyth has quoted, — a forcible 
 passage, no doubt, but making rather too much of an obvious truth. 
 There is no great discovery in the fact that we must rely on contemporary 
 information for our historical facts ; but if we say that we are to believe 
 nothing but the evidence of contemporaries, we shall destroy history alto- 
 gether. We must believe those things which, although not stated 
 by contemporaries, are stated by persons who had information which 
 can be traced up to contemporary sources. And then the question arises, 
 what ground is there for believing that the historian in a particular case 
 had the means of obtaining such information ? We believe, for 
 instance, the statements of Hume in his History of England; for we 
 know that he had many documentary sources of information, which he made 
 use of. 
 
 Mr. Forsyth. — Hume is full of errors. 
 
 Dr. CuRREY. — I am not saying that I believe everything he said ; but I 
 say that we accept his statements as historical because we know there were 
 many documents open to him, which he carefully examined, and therefore, 
 on the whole, he produced a true history, though he lived long after the 
 times of which he wrote. Errors he may have made either from carelessness 
 or prejudice. The critic may examine and discover these, but he does not 
 reject the whole history because it Avas not written by a contemporary. 
 That is the method we pursue, J suppose, in any history. We first examine 
 what were the sources of information which the historian had at his command. 
 In modern history this is not very difficult, but in more remote times it is 
 not always easy to ascertain what sources of information were open to an 
 historian. There must have been many with which we are not acquainted, 
 and which are not in our poss'ession. This is clearly shown in the case of
 
 2V 
 
 Herodotus, who gives us a history of the Egyptian kings, going back to a 
 remote antiquity ; and the great value of his history is that he accurately 
 reported what he saw and heard, after making diligent inquiry. He 
 reported the history of Egypt from the priest-kept registers which were to 
 a great extent supplied to him when he travelled in Egypt ; and it is a 
 remarkable fact that those registers have been confirmed in the most 
 striking manner by the discovery of monuments, whose inscriptions we have 
 of late years been enabled to decipher. There are many differences, but, 
 on the whole, the general history of the kings of Egypt, particularly of 
 the later ones, has been confirmed, and we can from Herodotus illustrate 
 the difference between anecdote and history. Take, for instance, the Saitic 
 dynasty which began with Psammetichus. Herodotus gives us a list of 
 kings confirmed in a very striking manner by the monuments, and we feel 
 quite certain that the list is correct, being derived from the records of the 
 priests ; but while he gives us this list correctly, he fills up his history with 
 anecdotes utterly incredible ; so that v/hen we speak of Herodotus as being 
 accurate and careful, we admit that he was accurate in relating what he 
 saw, and careful in recording what he heard ; but, at the same time, we are 
 bound to confess that ho accepted almost anything he was told with reference 
 to history. Take the case of Psammetichus himself : Herodotus gives a very 
 true account of him as the first of a dynasty which succeeded to the sole 
 government of Egypt after it had been divided among ^ number of 
 (Herodotus says twelve) independent princes. But he gives us a very curious 
 account how it arose from an oracle that any one who offererl a libation from 
 a brazen bowl should be king. At that time they had golden bowls ; but 
 on a certain occasion a bowl being wanted, and none forthcoming, 
 Psammetichus used a brazen helmet. He was suspected and driven into 
 banishment, whereupon he rose up in revenge, overthrew the twelve 
 princes, and so fulfilled the oracle. Now we have monumental records 
 which confirm the fact of Psammetichus having succeeded to the throne, 
 after Egypt had been governed by many princes ; but when we come to the 
 story about the oracle and its fulfilment, which Herodotus either received 
 from the priests, or invented for himself, we have no record of it at all, 
 we have only the account of Psammetichus succeeding to the throne of 
 Egypt, and of tlie princes being tributaries to the great Assyrian 
 monarchy. There were thirty subordinates when Psammetichus threw off 
 the yoke. So there we have a simple historical fact, and around it is a 
 fabulous narrative. That is quite characteristic of Herodotus, whose 
 leading facts are borne out by records, but who surrounds each fact with 
 poetical and legendary accounts, which he accepted without much reflection. 
 What I would maintain is this : that in determining the basis of liistory, we 
 must be content with less precise evidence than in the case of natural 
 phenomena, or in establishing occurrences of the day. We have not, and 
 cannot have, a series of events precisely similar to each other, which would 
 determine a truth by the law of induction, and we must often be content 
 with the testimony of persons far removed from the times at which they
 
 28 
 
 wrote. Our first step then must be to examine the genuineness of the 
 books which profess to give us an account of what happened — in times past. 
 But the presence in ancient histories of much which we are unable to 
 accept, does not necessarily invalidate the whole. Often under very fable 
 lies a substantial truth, as in the history of the Egyptian Psammetichus. It 
 is the province of the student of history to exercise his faculty of discrimination, 
 to separate the substantial facts from the accidental and sometimes fabulous 
 anecdotes by which they are accompanied, and to be careful to weigh the 
 relative importance of different parts , of a narrative. It may be doubtful 
 whether Wellington at Waterloo used the words, "Up guards and at 
 them " ; but there is no doubt that the battle of Waterloo was fought and 
 was decided by a final charge of the British Guards. Anecdote sometimes 
 is purely ornamental, sometimes it illustrates in a semi-poetical form the 
 historical fact to which it is attached. The historian must distinguish 
 between these two classes of anecdotes, and be upon his guard against view- 
 ing every part of a narrative as of equal consequence, and so confounding anec- 
 dote with history. — Were certain books really written by the historians whose 
 names they bear ? This generally depends on the recognition of those works 
 by a series of writers from a very early time. We must then examine 
 as to whether it was probable that the historian had access to information 
 which might be derived from contemporary sources. After this we must 
 examine the character of the historian, and see whether he was likely to be 
 honest, or whether there were any motives to induce him to disguise the facts ; 
 and then we must see whether he had the faculty of really understanding 
 and interpreting the documents which he examined. The laws of evidence, 
 therefore, require us to see first, what sources were open to the historian ; 
 secondly, whether he was capable of making proper use of these sources ; 
 thirdly, whether his character was such as to lead us to suppose that 
 he would use them with ability and honesty, and on this point we must judge 
 in a great measure from the internal evidence supplied by the books them- 
 selves. Then, fourthly, we nmst examine the facts themselves, and see 
 if they are such as seem to be consistent with what followed upon them. Do 
 they give a good account of institutions that rise up in consequence, and are 
 they consistent among themselves ? Fifthly, we must see, if possible, whether 
 there is any concurrent testimony. These seem to me to be the leading points 
 which affect the laws of evidence with reference to Mstory. (Cheers.) 
 
 The Eight Hon. Stephen Cave, M.P.— I have not had the same advantage 
 which the Master of the Charterhouse had, in seeing the paper before I came 
 here ; but still I should like to make a few observations on the subject. I 
 think that a great deal of what has fallen from Dr. Currey is true criticism, 
 but I also think that he has rather underrated the value of anecdote in 
 history. (Cheers.) The fact is, if you go back to the Old Testament, 
 the oldest of all histories, you find it is made up of anecdote ; and history 
 generally, as accepted by the bulk of the people, is one mass of anecdotes, 
 some of which are most valuable. That, I think, is a point which Mr. 
 Forsyth intended to bring out in his paper ; at all events, it struck me. We
 
 29 
 
 know perfectly well that what he wanted to show was that many anecdotes 
 currently believed in cannot be true, while many others which appear to be im- 
 possible, and which bear much upon history, are really true. In other words, 
 he says : — " Oh, infidel, great is thy faith ! You believe things which are 
 in themselves absolutely incredible ; but you reject those things which are 
 really capable of proof ! " Lepsius, the Prussian, who wrote on Egypt and the 
 Holy Land, says, in speaking of the Israelites on their journey to Palestine, 
 that they lived upon manna, which he describes, not as " angels' food," but as a 
 natural exudation from the tamarisk. Fancy the absurdity of supposing that 
 two millions of people could have existed upon the exudation of the tamarisk, 
 which would not have served one half of them for one day's luncheon. 
 Laughter.) This shows how credulous a sceptic may be on certain points. 
 Then you may find anecdotes, which apparently at first sight are very incre- 
 dible, and yet, on examination, are capable of almost perfect proof. Any- 
 body would suppose that the house of Simon the tanner in Jaffa would have 
 perished out of the memory of man ; and yet, as Dean Stanley says, there is 
 hardly any tradition which is so perfectly authenticated as that which 
 points out the site of Simon's house. A tanner requires fresh water for 
 carrying on his trade, and there is only one well of fresh water 
 in Jaffii, and that is in the courtyard of the house which is pointed 
 out as the house of Simon the tanner, which must necessarily have stood 
 there, unless, indeed, an earthquake had altered the face of the neighbour- 
 hood. Then, there are many traditions which we know are not true ; take, 
 for instance, the traditions with regard to our Saviour, and His appearance, 
 and many circumstances which took place soon after His death. We reject 
 altogether the miracles which He is said to have performed as a child, such as 
 making clay birds and bidding them fly. We reject these things because 
 they are childish, and there is no object in them. Again we have had handed 
 down to us the idea of our Saviour's face and of His appearance, derived very 
 much from a bas-relief which was supposed to have been sculptured in very 
 early times, — at the time of His death, indeed,— and sent to Tiberius by 
 Pontius Pilate, but, falling into the hands of Saladin, it came into Europe 
 after many vicissitudes. It was carved on an emerald. I have also seen a 
 bronze medal with a similar profile, of which nearly the same story is told. 
 P>ut we know that for many centuries after His death there was no likeness 
 of Him at all, and that His disciples rather avoided touching on His 
 crucifixion, which they considered a very degrading punishment ; and in 
 all the catacombs and the famous mosaics at Eavenna you find allegorical 
 representations, but no portrait of our Lord as an individual until 300 
 years after His death, and then it first occurs in the catacomb of 
 St. Calixtus at Eome. We find that there is no proof whatever of the 
 monkish traditions with regard to the early ages after the life of 
 our Saviour. Again, take the case of Herodotus : we acknowledge that 
 he was an historian who intended to speak the truth so far as he knew 
 it, notwithstanding that he is called " the father of lies." He no doubt 
 recorded an immense number of lies ; but he said, " I do not say these things
 
 30 
 
 are true : I did not see them : I simply say what the priests told me." We 
 find something of the same sort in quite modern history. Most of you have 
 read the book of Hue and Gabet, the Jesuit travellers, who went through 
 China and Thibet into Russia. They accurately record what they saw, but 
 they also speak of things which we consider impossible, though in those 
 cases they carefully abstain from saying that they saw what they describe. 
 But, unfortunately, they went from Paris before their work was published, 
 and gave their manuscript into the hands of a publisher who thought 
 he would give the public something sensational, so that they would be the 
 more likely to buy the book. In one remarkable instance in which the 
 travellers were referring to the sacred tree of Thibet, they were made to say 
 that they saw the sacred verses growing upon the leaves and upon the bark 
 of the tree, and, of course, every one was ready to say, " These men are de- 
 ceivers." It turned out, however, that nobody was more astonished at the story 
 than the authors themselves, who had merely given it as a story which they 
 had heard from the priests, but whose publisher had omitted that import- 
 ant qualification. This shows how difficult it is, after the lapse of a 
 number of years, to find out what is the truth of the historian, and how far 
 he has been misrepresented, or how far he has been misled. Nobody knows 
 who wrote Ossian, and it is doubtful whether Rowley's poems were written 
 by Chatterton, or by some one ,else. On the last page of this paper Mr. 
 Forsyth has laid down a great many canons for the belief or disbelief of 
 history, and I think he has laid them down in a satisfactory way ; but if 
 we are to take the testimony of contemporary writers, I would ask 
 every one to take the history of the last ten years, as written by the Standard, 
 and as written by the Daily News ; and I maintain that nothing which Lord 
 Macaulay has said about the Duke of Marlborough or William III. would 
 diff'er from, any other author more than the writers in these two newspaper;^ 
 differ from each other, and yet, for want of anything better, we must take 
 them as the historians of the present day, for future times. What I 
 desire to show is that the reception of anecdote in certain cases goes a 
 great way to prove what is the belief of the people with regard to the his- 
 tory of their times, but I admit it does not follow from this acceptance 
 that that history is true. There is an instance in the time of Pope Leo X. : 
 some people went from Spain to that Pope, and told him that they had 
 found a new saint, and had got his grave-stone, on yhich was inscribed his 
 name, St. Viar, and they wished him to be canonized, as it was quite proper 
 that he should be added to the calendar. Pope Leo, who was much more 
 learned than most of the men of his age, had never heard of St. Viar, and 
 doubted the whole case exceedingly ; but he sent competent people into 
 Spain to investigate the matter, and obtain information. I dare say you 
 all remember the case of "Bill Stumps, his X mark," in Pichvick 
 (Laughter.) Well, the case of St. Viar turned out to be something like 
 it. They found on a large stone the letters " S VIAR," and they saw at 
 once that it was a piece of an old Roman mUe-stone, which had been signed 
 by somebody who held the post of Prefectus Viarum, but all the letters had
 
 31 
 
 been worn or broken away except five. (Laughter.) Would anybody who 
 accepted that anecdote as historical be a good judge of the truth of the 
 history of those times ? I think not. I believe it was Walpole who said : 
 " Do not read me history, because that must be false," and there is a certain 
 amoiint of truth in that. You cannot go back to the time when some 
 histories were written and find the crass ignorance which then prevailed, 
 without feeling a considerable doubt as to what was accepted as history in 
 those days, without even taking into account the personal danger incurred 
 by those who ventured to take a view opposed to that of the government of 
 the day. Perhaps the most reliable evidence in former days is derived from 
 the drama, especially from comedy — from Aristophanes down to our own 
 day ; plays, which are subjected to contemporary criticism of all parties, 
 are most valuable adjuncts to tests of contemporary history. I think we 
 ought all to feel very much obliged to Mr. Forsyth for his paper, and also 
 to Dr. Currey for the able speech which the paper has called forth from 
 him. 
 
 The Chairman. — I hope we shall have the advantage of hearing many 
 speakers this evening. We have already had some valuable remarks on 
 historic anecdote ; but we must not forget that the subject of the evening is 
 upon the rules of evidence. 
 
 The Eev. Prebendary 0. A. Eow. — I think the meeting is in considerable 
 danger of missing the subject of discussion, which is the rules of evidence 
 that are to be applied to the credibility of history. I think Mr. Forsyth 
 has pointed out with sufficient distinctness, first, that history must be founded 
 on contemporary testimony ; and secondly, that all those things which are 
 now called history, but concerning which we have no knowledge that they 
 were founded on contemporary history, must fall to the ground. In a paper 
 which I read myself, on the same subject, some twelve months ago,* I confess 
 that I failed on one point, and I do not think Mr. Forsyth has supplied the 
 defect. I failed from not knowing how to lay down a canon as to how fiir 
 the principle of historical conjecture may be legitimately applied in the re- 
 production of history. I satisfied myself that there is a vast amount of con- 
 jecture which has been introduced into history without warrant, and has been 
 propounded as representing real and positive facts. Dr. Currey mistook me 
 on that occasion as absolutely denying that the principle of conjecture is 
 applicable to historical inquiry ; but that was far from my view. My point 
 was, how far may we go in that direction ? And it is a point of the deepest 
 interest, because it is on that ground that all the sceptical criticism of the Old 
 and New Testament is based. I have just been reading, with much interest, the 
 last published work of Kenan ; it is, really, a history of Christianity from the 
 year 60 to the year 76, and contains a number of facts, which the author has 
 managed to unite by a considerable amount of historical conjecture. But 
 this is the point which presents itself to my mind, — How can I dis- 
 
 Vol. vii. p. 28:
 
 tinguish facts from fictions, and how far is the conjecture valid.* Let me take 
 an example which will show that historical conjecture is valid within certain 
 limits. Whoever has read the first epistle of Clement knows that it 
 contains an obscure passage referring to the death of Peter and Paul, and 
 ascribing it to envy. I candidly confess that I never could conceive what 
 the writer referred to. But Kenan has gone over the ground, and I think 
 he has dispelled the doubt as to what was meant : there was an enormous 
 amount of Jewish influence at the court of Nero ; the empress was a 
 Jewess, and many others at the court were Jews. He has shown the 
 danger which the Christians were under of being accused of seeking to 
 overturn the established worship ; but he points out that those charges 
 would have fallen with equal weight upon the Jews. Why, then, did Nero 
 persecute the Christians and not the Jews ? Eenan has solved that question 
 by showing that the Jewish influence at the court caused the accusations to 
 fall only on the Christians, and that the Jews were actuated by feelings of 
 envy. I think that is a very fair instance of what may be called legitimate 
 historical reconstruction. There are many other cases to be found in 
 Kenan's book, but I camiot deny that that principle of historical recon- 
 struction is also employed to establish several points which are of the 
 greatest danger to us. All this is done by Renan with the greatest degree 
 of plausibility, and I should have been glad had Mr. Forsyth done some- 
 thing to aid us in judging as to when we may rely upon these historical con- 
 jectures, and under what circumstances we must reject them. — It is astonishing 
 to find what a large amount of history is sometimes reconstructed from a very 
 small quantity of isolated facts. — On one point, however, it is satisfactory to 
 find that Renan has set himself in opposition to the German critics, by 
 denying that it is possible to write history on a priori principles. This is a 
 most important point, because, as you are aware, all the great German 
 critics construct history upon a priori principles, and it is a very satis- 
 factory thing to see that Renan emphatically denounces this method. He 
 admits that eight of the epistles of St. Paul were written by him ; two more 
 he is in doubt about, but the others are authentic, and were certainly 
 written before the year 70. This is a great concession from such a writer as 
 Renan, who, while he fully admits that it is impossible to reconstruct 
 history on a priori principles, and that the Germans who have attempted 
 it have only reproduced the subjective creations of their own minds, 
 I regret has not carried that principle out throughout his own work. It 
 is of great importance to get some light on this point, namely, as to 
 how far in the dark periods of history one may be entitled to go upon 
 historical conjecture, and how far historical conjecture is valid. Many 
 modern historians have dealt largely with that principle in applying it to 
 secular history ; but in writing ecclesiastical history it is enormously 
 prevalent, and we are much in the dark as to what was the real nature of 
 
 * In the Annual Address for 1874, Dr. Thornton has commented upon 
 this mode of dealing with history. — Ed.
 
 33 
 
 the ecclesiastical history of the first three centuries. It has been written 
 through the spectacles of narrow views, and we have as many ecclesiastical 
 histories as there are narrow views. We want a thoroughly critical analysis 
 of the evidence on which a great deal of what is called the history of that 
 time rests. We have much evidence that we can trace to distinctly con- 
 jectural sources, and we ought to be careful in ascertaining how far the 
 evidence rests upon direct historical testimony. Dr. Currey is fearful 
 lest a large portion of so-called history should be consigned to the 
 grave ; but it is better to do this than to set up myths and call them 
 history. 
 
 The Eev. J. Sinclair.— It is difficult to speak upon such a subject as that 
 before us with precision and scientific accuracy. What we want is some 
 test whereby we can determine the truth or falsehood of some events 
 alleged to have taken place in the past. That is the desideratum, and my 
 impression on listening to this paper is, that it contains an answer to that 
 question, but that it does not put the answer in a sufficiently definite form. 
 This may seem a bold statement to make, but I hope the author of the paper 
 will excuse it, as I am simply expressing the feeling produced on my mind by 
 the paper. There is one point which has been distinctly enunciated, both in the 
 paper, and more or less in all the comments upon it, and that is, that the 
 proper evidence on which to believe a statement with respect to anything 
 alleged to have taken place in the past, is the testimony of witnesses who are 
 competent, from their ability, their opportunity, and their honesty, to bear 
 witness to the point. So fiir we have got something positive and satisfac- 
 tory, but we require a great deal more than that, in order to test the accuracy 
 of an historical statement. In the first place, we want evidence as to 
 the moral and intellectual competence of the witnesses. We are not 
 X)ersonally acquainted with them : none of us have had an intimacy with 
 Thucydides, with Herodotus, with Livy, or with any other of the old 
 historians. We want some evidence of the old historians ; we want 
 some evidence of their intellectual and moral capability of testifying as 
 to those matters of fact with which they have dealt, and anything which can 
 be discovered as to the characters of such men, and which throws light on 
 their mental or moral character, assists us in judging how much credit we 
 may attach to their testimony. This only indicates the direction in which 
 the historical student has to look for the grounds of rational belief. Another 
 question is suggested to the mind of one who stands in this attitude, and 
 that is : How do we know that these statements were actually made by 
 the person whose name is attached to them ? How do we know that 
 they are the genuine statements of Herodotus or Livy, or any one 
 else, when we had not the privilege of seeing them make the state- 
 ment ? We must look for evidence in confirmation of this, and that 
 points to another line of inquiry. Anything which tends to prove 
 that a book was actually written by the particular person whose name 
 is affixed, to it, helps us in forming a rational judgment as to the trust- 
 worthiness of that liistory ; there has not been much allusion to these 
 (8) d
 
 84 
 
 matters in the paper. But I come to some things of great importance which 
 have been stated with considerable clearness. As confirmatory of such 
 statements as may constitute the body of a particular author, Mr. Forsyth has 
 said that the consistent and concurrent testimony of independent witnesses 
 adds very much to the claim of such testimony upon our belief ; and I would 
 add to this unquestionably correct canon, that if it is known that 
 those witnesses are not only independent, but of an opposite bias, 
 there is much greater reason for giving credit to their statements. For 
 example, if we should discover some statement with respect to a 
 matter of fact made both in the Standard and in the Daihj Neivs, the fact 
 being one in regard to which they had some inducement to take an opposite 
 view, nothing could be more conclusive than that such evidence related to 
 an absolute fact. Another thing mentioned is the recognition of such 
 statements in contemporary authors, besides those who have actually advanced 
 or expressly made them. The allusion of a contemporary author to a state- 
 ment as embodying a fact, is a very great confirmation of that fact, upon 
 whosesoever authority it was originally made ; and sometimes the more delicate 
 and indirect the allusion, the greater is the evidence it afi'ords of the 
 historical truth of the statement. These are the primary and essential 
 grounds of historical truth — conditions which our intellect and reason must 
 demand as the grounds of belief in any statement with respect to the past. 
 My only complaint with regard to the paper is, that it does not distinguish, 
 with sufficient clearness, between the primary evidences and those 
 which are indirect and secondary. Keference has been made, with 
 great propriety, to the truth - likeness of a statement ; its con- 
 sistency with general experience, and with known and admitted facts, 
 whether ascertained by our own experience, or sifted and tested and esta- 
 blished by others. Then, the moral tone of the authors ; the consistency of 
 the statements with the characters of the persons by whom they were made ; 
 and the apparent motive with which they were made : these things, taken 
 together, constitute a very formidable hodj of internal evidence, which, in 
 the absence of external evidence, have almost conclusive weight in the mind 
 of any intelligent inquirer. That of which I complain in the paper is that it 
 has not, with sufficient precision and definiteness, and not in sufficiently logical 
 order, stated these canons of historical credibility, if I may so call them, and 
 thus put the matter before us in a way Avhich we cottld remember, so as 
 to be able afterwards to make proper use of the conclusions to which the 
 arguments of the paper really lead. One word -with regard to the question 
 of the last speaker, as to the use of historical conjecture. It seems to me 
 that the past and present make, in combination, what you may call historical 
 phenomena, — facts about which the mind is naturally curious and desirous of 
 explanation. Now, according to my view, it is just as legitimate for the 
 student of history to forui a theory by which these phenomena or facts may 
 be accounted for, as it is for the student of natural science to form a theory 
 which accounts for the phenomena of nature. Such theories are called pro- 
 visional, or working theories, and, as such, they are of great value ; and, if we
 
 35 
 
 teep their true use and value in view, theories of conjecture are just as 
 valuable with regard to civil or political truth, as they are with respect to 
 science. (Cheers.) 
 
 Mr. Forsyth. — I will detain you with very few remarks hi reply. With 
 reference to what was said by Dr. Currey, who complains that I have 
 devoted too much attention to historical anecdotes, if he looks at the 
 paper again, he will find that there is but one page of anecdotes, and 
 there are twenty-one pages devoted to the rest of the subject. I have 
 to thank my right hon. friend, Mr. Cave, for his defence of the use of 
 anecdotes in history. You "svill find that many so-called historical facts 
 to which we attach importance, are simply anecdotes. ' Let me mention 
 one case, — that of the Treaty of Utrecht ; it is said that that treaty was 
 made by the Tories because Mrs. JSIasham spilt a cup of tea on Queen Anne's 
 gown, whereupon Queen Anne, in a pet, quarrelled with the Whigs, and 
 went to the Tories, which led to the Treaty of Utrecht, and changed the face 
 of Europe. It is objected that I did not in my paper lay down, in a tabulated 
 form, the canons of historical criticism. I did not do so, because nothing is 
 «o dull and repulsive as such a tabulation. It is all very well for the blue- 
 l)Ook of a statistician ; but in the paper I thought it out of place. 
 I am happy to say that every single rule which has been suggested 
 by Dr. Currey and Mr. Sinclair, will be found implied, and even stated 
 and illustrated, in the paper. Not one single rule has been suggested 
 which is not to be found in the paper. Only one other remark ; Dr. Currey 
 has said that my paper has supplied him with nothing to go upon. I am 
 very sorry for it ; but I do not think it is so useful to tell people what 
 they are to believe, and to make them as credulous as possible 
 with regard to the history of the past, as to caution them with reference 
 to the kind of evidence they ought to rely upon, and with regard to wha 
 they ought to believe. We have lately had a most humiliating spectacle 
 in England of the credulity of mankind. I would not have alluded 
 to it for one moment if the trial* had still been going on, but to me 
 nothing has been more humiliating ' as regards the British public, than to 
 find that for a period of two years and a half it has been possible to keep 
 up a gross and gigantic imposture, when the whole question was a question 
 of evidence and perfectly germane to the subject. Minds which are accustomed 
 to deal with and to weigh evidence — conflicting evidence — in evenly-balanced 
 scales, could have had no doubt as to the result. In every case that can 
 be mentioned, or in almost every case, there are arguments for, and argu- 
 ments against. As Dr. Johnson said, there are arguments for a plenum 
 in nature, and arguments for a vacuum in nature, but there must be either 
 the one or the other. Let us illustrate this by the case in question. A man is 
 said to have perished eighteen years ago. After twelve years have elapsed, 
 -a man comes forth and says : — " I am that man, and have risen, as it were. 
 
 * The Tichborne Trial.
 
 36 
 
 from the grave. I am one of eight men who were saved from the ship that 
 was lost. Those eight men, inckiding myself, were taken on board another 
 vessel, where there were twenty-three men, and these twenty-three men took 
 us to the port of Melbourne, where we were all landed safe and sound. I 
 now come forward to claim the estates." But not one single living soul ever 
 heard of any one of those men, or ever had a line from them, and from that 
 hour to this there has been a dead, unbroken silence with regard to these 
 thirty-one men. Now I say that any man who could believe that story, 
 because this claimant remembered a number of trifles, has just that want 
 of the proper knowledge of the principles of evidence which belong to a 
 man of a very low condition of intellect. The habit of testing evidence, 
 and of being sceptical, is rather more important than the habit of swallowing 
 evidence without examination. (Cheers.) 
 The Meeting was then ndiourued. 
 
 \rTMAX AKD SOXS, PHIHTBHS, GHEAT QtTBEW STEEET, LOWBOKj W.C.
 
 £■"•'<«"- 
 
 
 
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