An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists Part 57

56 Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, c. v. b. 1. Part 3, p. 125.

Whately's Rhetoric, Part 1. ch. 2. -- 4. 1 Stark. Evid., p. 487.

57 See the Quarterly Review, vol. xxviii. p. 465. These narrators were, the d.u.c.h.ess D'Angouleme herself, the two Messrs. De Bouille, the Duc De Choiseul, his servant, James Brissac, Messrs. De Damas and Deslons, two of the officers commanding detachments on the road, Messrs. De Moustier and Valori, the garde du corps who accompanied the king, and finally M. de Fontanges, archbishop of Toulouse, who though not himself a party to the transaction, is supposed to have written from the information of the queen. An earlier instance of similar discrepancy is mentioned by Sully. After the battle of Aumale, in which Henry IV. was wounded, when the officers were around the king's bed, conversing upon the events of the day, there were not two who agreed in the recital of the most particular circ.u.mstances of the action. D'Aubigne, a contemporary writer, does not even mention the king's wound, though it was the only one he ever received in his life. See Memoirs of Sully, vol. i. p. 245. If we treated these narratives as sceptics would have us treat these of the sacred writers, what evidence should we have of any battle at Aumale, or of any flight to Varennes?

58 Far greater discrepancies can be found in the different reports of the same case, given by the reporters of legal judgments than are shown among the evangelists; and yet we do not consider them as detracting from the credit of the reporters, to whom we still resort with confidence, as to good authority. Some of these discrepancies seem utterly irreconcilable. Thus, in a case, 45 Edw. III. 19, where the question was upon a gift of lands to J. de C. with Joan, the sister of the donor, and to their heirs, Fitzherbert (t.i.t. _Tail_, 14) says it was adjudged fee simple, and not frankmarriage; Statham (t.i.t. _Tail_) says it was adjudged a gift in frankmarriage; while Brook (t.i.t. _Frankmarriage_) says it was not decided. (Vid. 10 Co.

118.) Others are irreconcilable, until the aid of a third reporter is invoked. Thus, in the case of Cooper v. Franklin, Croke says it was not decided, but adjourned; (Cro. Jac. 100); G.o.dbolt says it was decided in a certain way, which he mentions; (G.o.db. 269); Moor also reports it as decided, but gives a different account of the question raised; (Moor, 848); while Bulstrode gives a still different report of the judgment of the court, which he says was delivered by Croke himself. But by his account it further appears, that the case was previously twice argued; and thus it at length results that the other reporters relate only what fell from the court on each of the previous occasions. Other similar examples may be found in 1 Dougl.

6, n. compared with 5 East, 475, n. in the case of Galbraith _v_.

Neville; and in that of Stoughton _v_. Reynolds, reported by Fortescue, Strange, and in Cases temp. Hardwicke. (See 3 Barnw. & Ald. 247, 248.) Indeed, the books abound in such instances. Other discrepancies are found in the names of the same litigating parties, as differently given by reporters; such as, Putt _v_. Roster, (2 Mod. 318); Foot _v_. Rastall, (Skin. 49), and Putt _v_. Royston, (2 Show. 211); also, Hosdell _v_. Harris, (2 Keb. 462); Hodson _v_.

Harwich, (Ib. 533), and Hodsden _v_. Harridge, (2 Saund. 64), and a mult.i.tude of others, which are universally admitted to mean the same cases, even when they are not precisely within the rule of _idem sonans_. These diversities, it is well known, have never detracted in the slightest degree from the estimation in which the reporters are all deservedly held, as authors of merit, enjoying, to this day, the confidence of the profession. Admitting now, for the sake of argument, (what is not conceded in fact,) that diversities equally great exist among the sacred writers; how can we consistently, and as lawyers, raise any serious objection against them on that account, or treat them in any manner different from that which we observe towards our own reporters?

59 Mr. Hume's argument is thus refuted by Lord Brougham. "Here are two answers, to which the doctrine proposed by Mr. Hume is exposed, and either appears sufficient to shake it.

"_First_-Our belief in the uniformity of the laws of nature rests not altogether upon our own experience. We believe no man ever was raised from the dead,-not merely because we ourselves never saw it, for indeed that would be a very limited ground of deduction; and our belief was fixed on the subject long before we had any considerable experience,-fixed chiefly by authority,-that is, by deference to other men's experience. We found our confident belief in this negative position partly, perhaps chiefly, upon the testimony of others; and at all events, our belief that in times before our own the same position held good, must of necessity be drawn from our trusting relations of other men-that is, it depends upon the evidence of testimony. If, then, the existence of the law of nature is proved, in great part at least, by such evidence, can we wholly reject the like evidence when it comes to prove an exception to the rule-a deviation from the law? The more numerous are the cases of the law being kept-the more rare those of its being broken-the more scrupulous certainly ought we to be in admitting the proofs of the breach. But that testimony is capable of making good the proof there seems no doubt. In truth, the degree of excellence and of strength to which testimony may arise seems almost indefinite. There is hardly any cogency which it is not capable by possible supposition of attaining. The endless multiplication of witnesses,-the unbounded variety of their habits of thinking, their prejudices, their interests,-afford the means of conceiving the force of their testimony, augmented _ad infinitum_, because these circ.u.mstances afford the means of diminis.h.i.+ng indefinitely the chances of their being mistaken, all misled, or all combining to deceive us. Let any man try to calculate the chances of a thousand persons who come from different quarters, and never saw each other before, and who all vary in their habits, stations, opinions, interests,-being mistaken or combining to deceive us, when they give the same account of an event as having happened before their eyes,-these chances are many hundreds of thousands to one. And yet we can conceive them multiplied indefinitely; for one hundred thousand such witnesses may in all like manner bear the same testimony; and they may all tell us their story within twenty-four hours after the transaction, and in the next parish. And yet, according to Mr. Hume's argument, we are bound to disbelieve them all, because they speak to a thing contrary to our own experience, and to the accounts which other witnesses had formerly given us of the law of nature, and which our forefathers had handed down to us as derived from witnesses who lived in the old time before them. It is unnecessary to add that no testimony of the witnesses, whom we are supposing to concur in their relation, contradicts any testimony of our own senses. If it did, the argument would resemble Archbishop Tillotson's upon the Real Presence, and our disbelief would be at once warranted.

"_Secondly_-This leads us to the next objection to which Mr. Hume's argument is liable, and which we have in part antic.i.p.ated while ill.u.s.trating the first. He requires us to withhold our belief in circ.u.mstances which would force every man of common understanding to lend his a.s.sent, and to act upon the supposition of the story told being true. For, suppose either such numbers of various witnesses as we have spoken of; or, what is perhaps stronger, suppose a miracle reported to us, first by a number of relators, and then by three or four of the very soundest judges and most incorruptibly honest men we know,-men noted for their difficult belief of wonders, and, above all, steady unbelievers in miracles, without any bias in favour of religion, but rather accustomed to doubt, if not disbelieve,-most people would lend an easy belief to any miracles thus vouched. But let us add this circ.u.mstance, that a friend on his death-bed had been attended by us, and that we had told him a fact known only to ourselves,-something that we had secretly done the very moment before we told it to the dying man, and which to no other being we had ever revealed,-and that the credible witnesses we are supposing, informed us that the deceased appeared to them, conversed with them, remained with them a day or two, accompanying them, and to avouch the fact of his reappearance on this earth, communicated to them the secret of which we had made him the sole depository the moment before his death;-according to Mr. Hume, we are bound rather to believe, not only that those credible witnesses deceive us, or that those sound and unprejudiced men were themselves deceived, and fancied things without real existence, but further, that they all hit by chance upon the discovery of a real secret, known only to ourselves and the dead man. Mr. Hume's argument requires us to believe this as the lesser improbability of the two-as less unlikely than the rising of one from the dead; and yet every one must feel convinced, that were he placed in the situation we have been figuring, he would not only lend his belief to the relation, but if the relators accompanied it with a special warning from the deceased person to avoid a certain contemplated act, he would, acting upon the belief of their story, take the warning, and avoid doing the forbidden deed. Mr. Hume's argument makes no exception. This is its scope; and whether he chooses to push it thus far or no, all miracles are of necessity denied by it, without the least regard to the kind or the quant.i.ty of the proof on which they are rested; and the testimony which we have supposed, accompanied by the test or check we have supposed, would fall within the grasp of the argument just as much and as clearly as any other miracle avouched by more ordinary combinations of evidence.

"The use of Mr. Hume's argument is this, and it is an important and a valuable one. It teaches us to sift closely and rigorously the evidence for miraculous events. It bids us remember that the probabilities are always, and must always be incomparably greater against, than for, the truth of these relations, because it is always far more likely that the testimony should be mistaken or false, than that the general laws of nature should be suspended.

Further than this the doctrine cannot in soundness of reason be carried. It does not go the length of proving that those general laws cannot, by the force of human testimony, be shown to have been, in a particular instance, and with a particular purpose, suspended."

See his Discourse of Natural Theology, Note 5, p. 210-214. (Ed.

1835.)

Laplace, in his Essai sur les Probabilites, maintains that, the more extraordinary the fact attested, the greater the probability of error or falsehood in the attestor. Simple good sense, he says, suggests this; and the calculation of probabilities confirms its suggestion. There are some things, he adds, so extraordinary, that nothing can balance their improbability. The position here laid down is, that the probability of error, or of the falsehood of testimony, becomes in _proportion_ greater, as the fact which is attested is more extraordinary. And hence a fact extraordinary in the highest possible degree, becomes in the highest possible degree improbable; or so much so, that nothing can counterbalance its improbability.

This argument has been made much use of, to discredit the evidence of miracles, and the truth of that divine religion which is attested by them. But however sound it may be, in one sense, this application of it is fallacious. The fallacy lies in the meaning affixed to the term "extraordinary." If Laplace means a fact extraordinary _under_ its existing circ.u.mstances and relations, that is, a fact remaining extraordinary, notwithstanding all its circ.u.mstances, the position need not here to be controverted. But if the term means extraordinary _in the abstract_, it is far from being universally true, or affording a correct test of truth, or rule of evidence.

Thus, it is extraordinary that a man should leap fifteen feet at a bound; but not extraordinary that a strong and active man should do it, under a sudden impulse to save his life. The former is improbable in the abstract; the latter is rendered probable by the circ.u.mstances. So, things extraordinary, and therefore improbable under one hypothesis, become the reverse under another. Thus, the occurrence of a violent storm at sea, and the utterance by Jesus of the the words, "Peace, be still," succeeded instantly by a perfect calm, are facts which, taken separately from each other, are not in themselves extraordinary. The connexion between the command of Jesus and the ensuing calm, as cause and effect, would be extraordinary and improbable if he were a mere man; but it becomes perfectly natural and probable, when his divine power is considered. Each of those facts is in its nature so simple and obvious, that the most ignorant person is capable of observing it. There is nothing extraordinary in the facts themselves; and the extraordinary coincidence, in which the miracle consists, becomes both intelligible and probable upon the hypothesis of the Christian. (See the Christian Observer for Oct. 1838, p. 617.) The theory of Laplace may, with the same propriety, be applied to the creation of the world. That matter was created out of nothing is extremely improbable, in the abstract, that is, if there is no G.o.d; and therefore it is not to be believed. But if the existence of a Supreme Being is conceded, the fact is perfectly credible.

Laplace was so fascinated with his theory, that he thought the calculus of probabilities might be usefully employed in discovering the value of the different methods resorted to, in those sciences which are in a great measure conjectural, as medicine, agriculture, and political economy. And he proposed that there should be kept, in every branch of the administration, an exact register of the trials made of different measures, and of the results, whether good or bad, to which they have led. (See the Edinburgh Review, vol. xxiii. pp 335, 336.) Napoleon, who appointed him Minister of the Interior, has thus described him: "A geometrician of the first cla.s.s, he did not reach mediocrity as a statesman. He never viewed any subject in its true light; he was always occupied with subtleties; his notions were all problematic; and he carried into the administration the spirit of the _infinitely_ small." See the Encyclopedia Britannica, art.

Laplace, vol. xiii. p. 101. Memoires Ecrits a Ste. Helena, i. 3. The injurious effect of deductive reasoning, upon the minds of those who addict themselves to this method alone, to the exclusion of all other modes of arriving at the knowledge of truth in fact, is shown with great clearness and success, by Mr. Whewel in the ninth of the Bridgewater Treatises, book 3, ch. 6. The calculus of probabilities has been applied by some writers, to judicial evidence; but its very slight value as a test, is clearly shown in an able article on Presumptive Evidence, in the Law Magazine, vol. i. pp. 28-32 (New Series.)

60 See Mr. Norton's "Discourse on the latest form of Infidelity," p.

18.

61 The arguments on this subject are stated in a condensed form, by Mr.

Horne, in his Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures, vol.

i. ch. 4, sec. 2; in which he refers, among others, to Doctor Gregory's Letters on the Evidences of the Christian Revelation; Dr.

Campbell's Dissertation on Miracles; Vince's Sermons on the Credibility of Miracles; Bishop Marsh's Lectures, part 6, lect. 30; Dr. Adam's Treatise in reply to Mr. Hume; Bishop Gleig's Dissertation on Miracles, (in the third volume of his edition of Stackhouse's History of the Bible, p. 240, &c.); Dr. Key's Norissian Lectures, vol. i. See also Dr. Hopkins's Lowell Lectures, lect. I.

and II. delivered in Boston in 1844, where this topic is treated with great perspicuity and cogency.

Among the more popular treatises on miracles, are Bogue's Essay on the Divine Authority of the New Testament, ch. 5; Bishop Wilson's Evidences of Christianity, vol. i. lect. 7; Bishop Sumner's Evidences, ch. 10; Gambier's Guide to the Study of Moral Evidence, ch. v.; Mr. Norton's Discourse on the latest form of Infidelity, and Dr. Dewey's Dudleian Lecture, delivered before Harvard University, in May, 1836.

62 See Bishop Wilson's Evidences, lect. 7, p. 130.

63 1 Stark on Evid. p. 496-499.

64 1 Stark. on Evid. p. 523.

65 1 Stark. Evid. 487. The Gospels abound in instances of this. See, for example, Mark, xv. 21. John, xviii. 10. Luke, xxiii. 6. Matt.

xxvii. 58-60, John xi. 1.

66 1 Stark. Evid. 522, 585.

67 See 1 Stark. Evid. 498. Wills on Circ.u.mstantial Evidence, pp. 128, 129.

68 See Chalmers's Evidence, chap. iii.

69 See Chalmers's Evidence, pp. 76-78, Amer. ed. Proofs of this kind are copiously referred to by Mr. Horne, in his Introduction, &c.

vol. i., ch. 3, sect. II. 2.

70 See Mark viii. 32; ix. 5; and xiv. 29; Matt. xvi. 22; and xvii. 5; Luke ix. 33; and xviii. 18; John xiii, 8; and xviii. 15.

71 Mark viii. 29; Matt. xvi. 16; Luke ix. 20.

72 Matt. xviii. 21; and xix. 27; John xiii. 36.

73 Gal. ii. 11.

74 John xx. 3-6.

75 Matt. xiv. 30.

76 Acts i. 15.

77 Acts ii. 14.

78 Matt. xvi. 16; Mark viii. 29; Luke ix. 20; John vi. 69.

79 Matt. xxvi. 33, 35; Mark xiv. 29.

80 See Paley's view of the Evidences of Christianity, part ii. chapters iii. iv. v. vi. vii; Ibid. part iii. ch. i.; Chalmers on the Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation, ch. iii. iv.

viii.; Wilson's Evidences of Christianity, lect. vi.; Bogue's Essay on the Divine Authority of the New Testament, chap. iii. iv.

81 See Bogue's Essay, chap. i. sect. 2; Newcome's Obs. part ii. ch. i.

sec. 14.

82 Mal. iv. 5, 6.

83 Mic. iv. 7.

84 Is. xli. 8, 9; Gen. xxii. 16, seq.

85 Gen. xxii. 16, seq.

86 Matt. i. 19.

_husband_. There was commonly an interval of ten or twelve months, between the making of the contract of marriage and the time of its celebration. _Gen_. xxiv. 55; _Judg_. xiv. 8. During this period, though there was no intercourse between the bride and bridegroom, not even so much as an interchange of conversation, yet they were considered and spoken of as husband and wife. If, at the end of this probationary period, the bridegroom was unwilling to solemnize his engagements by the marriage of the bride, he was bound to give her a bill of divorce, as if she had been his wife. And if she, during the same period, had illicit intercourse with another man, she was liable to punishment, as an adulteress. JAHN'S Archaeol. -- 154.

87 Is. vii. 14.