Historical evidence

“ We must deal with the history, then, in the first place, as we should deal with all other histories. The historical student knows that his first business should be to inquire into the validity of his evidence, and the nature of the record in which the evidence is contained, that he may be able to form a proper estimate of the correctness of the conclusions which have been drawn from that evidence. ”

“ If by historical science be meant an increased precision in examining evidence and in testing documents, and in comparing narratives together, we will gladly use the word by courtesy; but if more than this be meant, if a claim be set up for history, which is not admitted even for theology, then in the name of truth, both Divine and human, let the pretence be exposed. ”

“ True, the real Science of History—the sifting of evidence, and the discovery and unravelling of ancient documents—may be described as an essentially modern attainment, so it would be unreasonable to blame our older historians for errors which it was largely, if not wholly, beyond their power to overcome. And it is just here that I would emphasise my defence of the Romancist. ”

“ In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. ”

“ The evidence of historic events which enter into tradition relates principally to the earliest periods, but much of it relates to periods well within the domain of history and yet reveals facts which history has either hopelessly neglected or misinterpreted. ”

“ It is not easy to draw out in detail the evidence on which we form, our opinion of character. We judge living men, not from single facts, but from a thousand trifles; and sound estimates of historical persons are pieced together from a general study of their actions, their writings, the description of friends and enemies, from those occasional allusions which we find scattered over contemporary correspondence, from materials which, in the instance of Henry VIII., consist of many thousand documents. ”

“ Let me, in concluding these observations, sum up in a few words some other advantages which you may derive from history. It is, I think, one of the best schools for that kind of reasoning which is most useful in practical life. It teaches men to weigh conflicting probabilities, to estimate degrees of evidence, to form a sound judgment of the value of authorities. ”

“ It often happens that a thing of great value to history, a piece of evidence which we now find invaluable, has come to us by an accident, the motive of its creation not historical at all nor really connected with record. ”

“ Few subjects in history are more difficult than the laws of evidence in dealing with the supernatural and the extent to which the authority of historians in relating credible and probable facts is invalidated by the presence of a mythical element in their narratives. ”

“ Some minor questions may be put, or kept in controversy, as one writer or another, who regards history as a matter of opinion, not of fact, and relying on tradition or hearsay evidence or on superficial investigation, gives a place to guesswork instead of truth, to historical conceits instead of historical verities. ”

“ Then, as we pass beyond the merely monumental stage, we find threads of historical evidence connecting the different branches of this race, increasing in their complexity and strengthening in their cumulative force as we go on, until at last we are brought to the history of the age in which we live ”

“ The several clauses of this censure deserve to be answered, as fully as the limits of this essay will permit.
In the first place, the facts are related upon the best intelligence, and the best vouchers that could be gleaned, after a great lapse of time. Probability was to be inferred from such materials, as could be procured, and no man better understood the nature of historical evidence than Dr. Johnson; no man was more religiously an observer of truth. ”

“ This is the evidence wherever survivals can be studied, whether in the midst of our own civilisation, or even of primitive civilisations, which constantly exhibit traces of older beliefs and ideas being pushed out of existence by newer. ”

“ A detailed observation of a man’s conduct over a period of time and through a succession of historical crises will yield sufficient evidence for an over-all judgment as to his intentions, and hence to his place in the historical drama in which he was engaged. ”

“ Moreover, the strength of our position is based upon a scientific conception of the development of the nation or people among whom survivals exist. It is not all parts of the nation which develop at the same rate, at the same time, and for the same period. There are social strata in every country, and it is the observance of these strata which has made it possible for the inquirer of to-day to use the evidence they afford for historical purposes. ”

“ It is at least necessary to distinguish provisionally between a possibly historical framework and narratives which may be of later growth—between the general outlines which only external evidence can test and details which cannot be tested and appear isolated without any cause or devoid of any effect. ”

“ Let them once come to compare the whole evidence for the Primacy, scriptural, traditional, analogical, and historical, which last alone comprehends the fourteen heads above enumerated, with the same evidence in behalf of any or all of those, and they cannot but admit its great superiority. ”

“ These four independent classes of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history and folklore. ”

“ They have invested it with such an atmosphere of mystery and falsetto, with what I may call a Sunday-school atmosphere, that a certain class of inquirers rush to an opposite extreme, and insist on canons of evidence and authenticity which would, if consistently used, eliminate all ancient literature and history. ”

“ It is a test of judgment to put oneself at the different points of view, so often conflicting, to be fair to all and to be firm in drawing conclusions where the weight of evidence seems to lie; and a knowledge of the slowness of this process of growth, with the careful thought and heroic action by which it has come about, creates a respect for government and prepares for a wiser use of the privileges enjoyed under its beneficent rule. ”

“ We are proving our claim, not by appeals to race prejudice or bigotry, but by incontrovertible evidence. In the words of the American-Irish Historical Society, we are laboring “that the world may know.”
There is a very erroneous impression in the minds of many, even in this enlightened age, that the struggle for liberty in Ireland has been a religious struggle, a struggle for the principles of Catholicity and for these principles alone. Our fight is not a religious fight. It is the fight for the liberties of a race, not a religion ”

“ From this outline we can realize at how late a period the legend of the Virgin Birth influenced the mind of the Church at large; yet Mr. Robertson, to smooth the way for his “mythic” theory, pretends that it was the earliest of all Christian beliefs, and without a tittle of evidence invents a pre-Christian Saviour-Sun-god Joshua, born of a virgin, Miriam. The whole monstrous conception is a preposterous coinage of his brain, a figment unknown to anyone before himself and bristling with impossibilities. ”

“ In each of these the reader gets in a cheap form, in modern and readable English, the kind of evidence upon which historians base their history, and he can use that evidence in the light of his own knowledge of human nature and his own judgment of human life. ”

“ If a so-called historical fact be brought into notice—as is very possible—by one or more facts which are not historical at all, and are for that very reason unknown, how is the historian going to establish the relation of these facts one to another? ”

“ In the first place it must be remembered that History itself possesses interest for us more as the unfolding of certain moral and mental developments than as the mere enumeration of facts. Of course, I am aware that the ideal of the Historian is Truth utterly regardless of prejudice and inclination, but, as with all other human ideals, this one is never fully realised, and there is ever that discrepancy between Fact and its Narration to which I just now alluded. ”

“ The aim of the investigator is simply the discovery of truth. Ecclesiastical history is precisely like constitutional history or economic history: it deals primarily with one aspect of the time, but it deals with it in a spirit of absolutely free inquiry and entire independence of judgment. ”

“ Drews, Robertson, and Benjamin Smith. And the best courage is to take one by one the ancient sources which bear witness to the man Jesus, examine and compare them, and weigh their evidence. If they are independent, if they agree, not too much—that would excite a legitimate suspicion—but only more or less and in a general way, then, I believe, any rational inquirer would allow them weight, even if none were strictly contemporaries of his and eye-witnesses of his life. In the Gospel of Mark we have the earliest narrative document of the New Testament. ”

“ It is a sound rule in history to accept none but positive evidence and to depend especially upon the evidence of documents. I will not debate how far tradition should be admitted into the reconstruction of the past. ”

“ Herodotus, too, lived not seventy, but nearly one hundred and fifty years later than Solon, so that contemporary evidence of him we have none. Plutarch preserves, no doubt, various laws and metrical aphorisms which were in his day attributed to Solon, just as the Christians attributed an extensive body of teaching to Jesus. If we deny all authenticity to Jesus’s teaching, what of Solon’s traditional lore? Obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon. ”

“ In the aged man describing the mathematical figure, the rude attempt of the boy in drawing; in the female figure with the distaff, the vessel on the stocks; in the primitive temple, and the dance of the peasants to the music of the pipe, we have evidence of the advance made in science, in the useful and the fine arts. ”

“ Appeal heard de novo.—All cases on appeals shall be heard by the boards of election commissioners de novo, and oral evidence may be heard by them; and they are authorized to administer oaths to witnesses before them; and they have the power to subpœna witnesses, and to compel their attendance; to send for persons and papers; to require the sheriff and constables to attend them and execute their process. ”

“ For facts cannot by reason of their own intrinsic character be divided into historical facts and non-historical facts. But any fact is something exceedingly complex. Will the historian represent facts in all their complexity? ”

“ The proof of the Christian system is founded on historical facts; from thence are drawn the principal motives of credibility, as they are called. We give credit to facts recorded in history, when they are related by an historian of credit ”

“ But if history means, as it did originally, research, and knowledge of real events based on such research, then the events of which we are going to speak are as real and as truly historical as the battle of "Waterloo." ”

“ Returning to and remaining in or moving in the concrete fact, or, rather, making of oneself thought that thinks the fact concretely, we experience the continual formation and the continual progress of our historical thought and also make clear to ourselves the history of historiography, which proceeds in the same manner. ”

“ Where the historian uses the press or pounder of his historical learning, documentary lore, abstracts, synthesis, statistics, and other professional devices, to squeeze thousands and hundreds of thousands of little vital personal incidents into a dense and arbitrary conglomerate known as "a historical fact," "a social phenomenon," "a mass movement," "evolution," "the mind of the race," or "historical truth" in general, the chronicler sees only the individual cases and even finds them pleasing in themselves. ”

“ It should be the aim of the impartial historian to examine all sides of a disputed question, to sift all statements, to examine all theories, to go, as far as possible, to the original sources for his facts, and, free from bias or prejudice to state only that which appears to be thoroughly corroborated as truth. ”

“ Anxious after truth, and unsatisfied with so many bold assertions destitute of all proof but the writer’s word, which I daily met with, I determined coolly and impartially to examine the evidence arising from ancient history, which both sides so frequently appealed to: for bare speculative reasoning is no more conclusive in political inquiries than in physical. Facts and experience alone must decide: and political facts and experience must alone be learned from history. ”

“ Our standards of judgment and appraisement here are doubtless open to question by a skeptical mind. We may lack the evidence which would make our estimate conclusive. But what I mean is this: histories have been written which satisfy to a remarkable degree the spirit of inquiry. They present that finality and inevitability which mark the master mind. There are, in other words, authorities which few of us ever question. ”

“ It must, however, be said that when a historian is dealing with men who have played a very prominent part on the stage of life, the general acceptance of his judgment is a strong corroboration of its truth. ”

“ Nothing is stated, not even the most minute and apparently imaginary details, without what was deemed good historical authority. The readers, therefore, may rely upon the record as the truth, and nothing but the truth, so far as an honest purpose and a careful examination have been effectual in ascertaining it. ”