Winter Evenings

Ornes ea vehementius quam fortassè sentis. Amori nostro plusculum etiam quin concedat veritas, largiare.

Cic. Epist. I. Lucceius.

Add a little more embellishment than you perhaps think strictly due. Bestow a little more upon your friendship for me than rigid truth would allow.

Quicquid Græcia mendax
Audet in historia.

Hor.

Her bold untruths in History’s page
Romancing Greece unfolds.

If you have been an ocular witness to an affray, a fire, or any occurrence in the street, and you see an account of it in all the newspapers next morning, though they should all pretend to accuracy and minuteness, you would find them all vary in some particulars from each other, and from the truth, yet without the least design to contradict or to deceive: but different reporters of the same facts saw them at different times, or in different lights, with various degrees of attention, and reported them with various degrees of fidelity, according to the variety in their powers of memory, or their talents for description.

In explaining the customs and describing places, which they have never seen, there is every reason to believe that most of the historians are unintentionally deceitful. It is seldom that neighbouring nations can know with accuracy each other’s most familiar actions, sports, diversions, and places of resort, by written accounts or oral description. Nothing but ocular observation can secure exactness. I was greatly much diverted with an article from the great French Encyclopedie, quoted in the notes to Mr. Mason’s English Garden. The word to be explained is bowling-green, spelt by the lexicographers Boulingrin. Boulingrin is a species of parterre, say they, composed of pieces of divided turf, with borders sloping (en glacis), and evergreens at the corners and other parts of it. It is mowed four times a-year to make the turf finer. The invention of this kind of parterre comes from England, as also its name, which is derived from boule round, and grin, fine grass or turf. Boulingrins are either simple or compound; the simple are all turf without ornament; the compound are cut into compartments of turf, embroidered with knots, mixt with little paths, borders of flowers, yew-trees, and flowering shrubs. Sand also of different colours contributes greatly to their value.

Such is the French description of a Bowling-green sanctioned by the great Encyclopedie.

The celebrated Mr. Sorbiere furnishes the following materials for an ecclesiastical historian of England, in his famous book of travels among us. He says, that our chief clergymen, who have pluralities of benefices, make their grooms their curates; that our bishops horribly abuse their jurisdiction in their excommunications and impositions; that they are so haughty, that none of the inferior priests dare to speak to them; that they rob the church, by letting its leases for thirty years, getting all the money into their own pockets, and leaving only a small revenue to their successors; and that England is a country where no man is afraid of committing simony.

It would be difficult to obtain an exact history of the events of yesterday; how much more of those which happened a hundred or a thousand years ago, and in times when the art of manual writing was not common, and men were prone to transmit to posterity by tradition, the dreams of the night, and the imaginations of their idle hours, as real and authentic history.

Those who wrote in the earlier periods, finding a death of materials, from the deficiency of written documents, sought in the powers of invention what they could not find in the archives of their country. A book was to be made, and it was to be entertaining. The terra incognita was therefore supplied with woods and mountains according to the will of the geographer. Hence the stories of Pygmies and Cranes, Gynocephali, Astromori, Hippopodes, Phanisii, and Trogolodytæ.

Herodotus, one of the earliest historians, writes a romance under the name of history, almost as fictitious as Don Quixote de la Mancha, but not nearly so ingenious and entertaining; yet he is called the Father of History. He might as justly be called the Father of Lies. The Chaldæan history of Berosus, and the Ægyptian history of Manetho, are deemed but the forgeries of Annius and Viterbo. Sanchoniathon’s Phœnician history is equally destitute of credit, if there is any confidence to be placed in the opinions of Scaliger and Dodwell.

Thus the very foundations, on which the splendid fabric of history is to be erected, are destitute of solidity. But they are usually strong enough to support the superstructure; which is too often but a paper building, a house of cards, pretty and diverting to look at, but of little use and value, when he entertainment it affords is deducted.

It would be a just description of the greater part of histories, to say of them, that they are historical romances, founded sometimes on fact, but capriciously related according to the historian’s prejudices, party, or misrepresentation, and fantastically embellished by the false colours of poetry and rhetoric.

Writers of history are often in a dependent state, and are ready to conceal, or palliate, or exaggerate any circumstance or transaction, according to the wishes of a party, a powerful nobleman, or a king. The learned pate ducks to the wealthy fool, and the pen of history is often guided by an illiterate despot.

The histories written by different persons of different parties are known to represent the very same things and persons as laudable and execrable, godlike and diabolical, at the same time.

There is a well-known historical instance of partiality recorded by Polybius, who was himself also extremely partial. Fabius and Philinus wrote the history of the Punic war; Fabius a Roman, and Philinus a Carthaginian. The Roman extolled his countrymen, and blamed the Carthaginians in every thing. The Carthaginian threw all the errors and defects on the Romans, and triumphed in the superiority of Punic valour, wisdom, and generosity. To whom was credit due? Certainly to neither; and have we no modern Fabii and Philini? Let us read the gazettes of different nations in a state of war.

When I am desirous of knowing real facts stript of fallacy, I look for them in some chronological table: but I read not a popular history. I peruse a popular history, only when I am desirous of being entertained by composition, by the charms of style, eloquence, and poetical painting; or of being amused with observing the influence of party, or religious prejudice, on the mind of the writer and his admirers. The real facts are the clay which the popular historian, like a modeller, forms into various shapes, according to his own taste and inclination, some to honour and some to dishonour. To some of it he gives great beauty not its own; some he throws away wantonly or artfully, and the rest he shapes into vulgar utensils; or models them into the deformity of caricature. It is a pleasing pastime to view his work; and men of taste and imagination are much delighted with his ingenuity. Weak and inexperienced persons believe him implicitly; others find real truth in him nearly in the same proportion as silver is found in a great mass of lead, or pearls in oyster-shells.

So little credit is to be given to historians, even in the recital of facts of public notoriety! how much less to their delineation of characters, and descriptions of motives for actions, secret counsels and designs, to which none was a witness but the bosom which entertained them! Yet many historians kindly communicate all. You would think them of the privy-council of all nations; that they possessed the attribute of omniscience, though their intelligence never came from a higher source than an old woman’s tale.

Your true, classical historian never finds any difficulties for want of matter. When he finds it not, he makes it. He is a poet in prose. I scarcely need mention those fine speeches in the very best ancient historians, not one syllable of which, except in a very few instances, was ever uttered by the personage to whom it is attributed. Truth gives a faint outline; the historian adds shades and colours, drapery, action, and expression. He lays on the red, the orange, the yellow, the blue, the purple, the violet, the black, and the white.

Some writers, in their attack on Christianity, have relied greatly on the representations of historians whose characters were remarkably bad both as men and as writers; who also laboured under the general imputation of misrepresenting truth, like every other historiographer. Whatever such writers find against the Christian cause in the most contemptible historians, they bring in triumph, and are ready to sing the song of victory, or cry out Eureka with Archimedes. But with all their pretensions to philosophy, they act most unphilosophically in giving implicit credit to wretched annalists, paltry tools of paltry princes, who are known to have fabricated a great part of their stories; and who, when they spoke against Christianity, saw it with the eyes of prejudiced heathens, or envious sophists, too proud to behold with patience a sect flourishing on the ruins of their own fame and dominion.

But it will be asked, whether what I have said against the credibility of history in general, may not be applied to the evangelical history. I answer that perhaps it might, if the credibility of that history did not chiefly depend on its internal evidence. I never yet saw any external evidence of it which might not admit of controversy; but the internal proofs have a counterpart in every man’s bosom, who will faithfully search for it, which gives it incontestable confirmation. The Evangelists and the Apostles were fallible men like other historians; but the Spirit of God, which operated on them, and now operates on all true Christians, teaches the humble inquirer to find truth there, and there only, in a state of perfect purity. We may amuse ourselves with tinsel and paste in mere human compositions; but gold and jewels are to be dug for in that mine; and happy they who know how to value them.

I will cite one strong internal evidence of the Gospel History from the preliminary observations to Macknight’s Harmony.

It is remarkable, that through the whole of their histories, the Evangelists have not passed one encomium upon Jesus, or upon any of his friends, nor thrown out one reflection against his enemies; although much of both kinds might have been, and no doubt would have been done by them, had they been governed by a spirit of imposture or enthusiasm. Christ’s life is not praised in the gospel, his death is not lamented, his friends are not commended, his enemies are not reproached, nor even blamed; but every thing is told naked and unadorned, just as it happened; and all who read are left to judge, and make reflections for themselves; a manner of writing which the historians never would have fallen into, had not their minds been under the guidance of the most sober reason, and deeply impressed with the dignity, importance, and truth of their subject.

There is, then, no history in the world so artless as the evangelical, and none which, from its manner, has so great an appearance of veracity.

But though this is not admitted for a moment by the sceptical writer; yet, at the same time, every passage against Christianity in ancient historians, however suspicious its character, is triumphantly cited by him as a full, a strong, and unanswerable evidence in favour of infidelity.

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