BOOKS.
THE VALUE OF HUMAN TESTIMONY.* Tam is a very shrewd and useful little book, which says all it does say exceedingly well. It insists that the value of testimony depends, in the first instance, in a very great measure on the importance attached by the witness to the facts to which he testifies. If the fact to which he testifies- is of little significance, if his interest in it is languid, and it.
has no real bearing on his life, it is not to be supposed that be will take the trouble to attend to the fact to which he-
bears witness with the care and the anxiety to be sure of what.
he sees or hears which is necessary to make his testimony of any real weight for other people. If, on the contrary, it.
is a fact on which a great change in his own career depends, if it alters his whole life, his whole character, if it involves him in much labour and suffering, if it kindles in him an altogether new ideal of purpose, then we may be quite sure that his testimony was both honest and careful, and that if it was supported by a great deal of other testimony of the same nature, it is in the highest degree trustworthy. Further,, our author insists that its transmission through a long line of tradition does not in any degree invalidate its authority. We should not attach much value to details so transmitted. If we were dependent on testimony transmitted from generation to generation as to the numbers and characterof the forces engaged.
in the Battle of Hastings, we should not attach much weight to it. But such a long line of transmission would not in the least diminish the value of the testimony as to the reality of that battle, and its result in the defeat of the Saxon and the victory of the Norman army. We should be well aware that.
that testimony must have been transmitted through a great many unwilling as well as a great many willing and triumphant witnesses. We should be well aware that all those witnesses.
must have had before their eyes the amplest evidence of the actual event, and of the revolution it brought about in the history of England. And we should never think of supposing anything so absurd as that at some specific date there was a. deliberate conspiracy formed by hundreds of thousands of living Englishmen to alter the whole drift of the testimony they had received from their fathers, and invent a battle whick never took place, or reverse its issue, and that that conspiracy should have succeeded in persuading the unborn generations of a gigantic lie. There could be neither machinery nor motive for such a successful conspiracy, and consequently the common-sense of mankind at once rejects a hypothesis. so audacious and absurd, with contempt.
In the third place, our author insists that prepossessions. more or less favourable to the beliefs of any period, are no reason for rejecting the more earnest and severely tested beliefs of that period. There is, for instance, he says, in almost all ages of the world a great deal too ranch. disposition to believe what tells to the discredit of our fellow- men. How many a false calumny obtains a certain superficial. credence ! How many a rumour of unfaithfulness or dis- honesty or vice is credited on the strength of mere hints and. innuendoes and vague suspicions ! That is quite true. But it does not prevent us from believing after irrefragabla evidence has established it, to take an illustration from the news of the day, that such an event as the recent stealing of the pearls and the perjury which followed it did actually take place, or that a certain attempt to blackmail a number of respectable persons with hardly a pretence or excuse for the charge, did happen the other day at Orford. Hence, the mere evidence that a certain tendency exists to believe any class of facts on very slight evidence, is no reason at all for rejecting evidence that is not slight, but very strong, and confirmed from many quarters as to a par- ticular event of that class.
• The Value of Human Teutinsony. By Thomsa Fitrarthnr. London : K egan Paul, Trench, and Co. All this is very well put by Mr. Fitzarthur, and ap- plied by him with great force to the case of the resur- rection of Christ. He shows that this was an event about which none of the first witnesses could possibly have been indifferent. It changed the whole course of their lives, and changed it in all worldly things very much for the worse. They had to endure the indignation of patriotic Jews, the hatred of bigoted Jews, the scorn of the Gentile world, the persecution of strong governments, the pangs of domestic reproaches and dismay ; and it is certain that they would not have encountered all these formidable dangers and miseries on the strength of any conviction which was not of the most solid and irresistible kind. Further, Mr. Fitzarthur shows that the objections founded on the ease with which men of that day accepted supernatural marvels, is of no real validity against a conviction of this kind of depth and strength, since had they not felt the fullest certainty that the resurrec- tion of Christ was a sign about which there could have been no mistake, it was quite open to them to treat it as one of the many marvels which the age accepted without allowing them to alter the course of practical men's lives. Prepossessed as we in this generation are to believe what is to the discredit of others, we should not allow ourselves to be induced to change the course of our lives by any testimony of the truth of which we had not satisfied ourselves by what we thought irre- fraga.ble evidence.
But what we miss in Mr. Fitzarthur's little treatise on the value of testimony, is some discussion of the relative signifi- cance of satisfactory testimony to a bare fact of great im- portance, and unsatisfactory testimony to the form. in which the fact was first recorded for the world at large. The modern notion evidently is, that you can hardly trust even good testimony as to the fact itself, however clear it is that those who testify to it had every means of ascertaining the truth, and every motive that the most overwhelming practical interest in its reality could give for assuring themselves of its truth, unless you can show that all the various accounts of it, as they finally and almost acci- dentally got themselves recorded, agree together and confirm -each other as to the mode in which the fact first came to be known. The destructive criticism of the last hundred years in relation to the Resurrection has practically hinged upon this assumption. It has been found that St. Paul's testimony (contained in his Epistle to the Corinthians) to the belief enter- tained in the early Church as to the number and order of Christ's appearances after his resurrection, does not coincide at all closely even with the account in St. Luke's or St. John's Gospels, while these last are not coincident, and none of them resemble in the least that given in St. Matthew, whereas the authentic text of St. Mark breaks off be- fore any account of the risen Christ's appearances is given. It is argued that if the traditions as to the manner of the various manifestations of the risen Christ to his disciples are thus divergent, we have no right to rely im- plicitly on the reality of the fact itself, since it is evident that the early Church did not sift and array the evidence as to this great central truth of Revelation with anything like the care with which historians would now sift and array the evidence of any great historical event, such as the surrender of the French army to the Germans at Sedan, or the simul- taneous discovery of the planet Neptune by Adams and Le Verrier. Now, is this true ? Ought we to have our confidence shaken as to the fact of Christ's resurrection by the diver- gencies between the various records of it, from St. Paul's record of the statements of the Church at the time of Ms. own conversion, to St. Matthew's brief record of a single Galilean manifestation ? Mr. Fitzarthur does not deal with this question at all, and yet it is one which seems to us to bear the most intimate relation to that of the value of the testimony be does discuss.
We hold that in a country and amongst a people where all the interest turned upon the question whether the expected Messiah had or had not manifested himself, the informal, fragmentary, and altogether unliterary shape in which the story is told by different authorities, is of very little im- portance as compared with the certainty that by all dis- ciples of Christ alike, the fact was so firmly held that it gave rise to a Christian Church, which has continued to flourish from that day to this. The only important question is,—Were the disciples confessedly. in the deepest
dejection on the Saturday and Sunday following the Cruci- fixion, and were they a living and flourishing Church on the Day of Pentecost which succeeded it? And could the transforma- tion have occurred without conviction having been borne in upon scores of minds that their Lord was living and filling them with new life ? Why should not the various accounts of Ws appearance have been fragmentary and divergent? It was not by those accounts that the disciples ever supposed themselves to have been reassured, but by their own experience. St. Paul declares that on one of these occasions above five hundred disciples had seen our Lord at once, of whom most still sur- vived at the time he wrote, though some were dead. It was the disciples' own experience, not the story related by others, that laid the foundation of the Church ; and it seems to us as unreasonable to make light of that experience because the tradition, as it was subsequently committed to writing by two or three different hands, appeared to be very fragmentary and inadequate, as it would be to throw any doubt on the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir because the story of it as given by two or three different writers who saw, or heard from those who had seen, quite different aspects of the battle, would furnish very un- satisfactory evidence of the engagement as it was reported from head-quarters by one who had heard and compared a consider- able number of official reports. St. Luke does profess to have compared and edited the different accounts ; but St. Matthew does not, and it is childish to distrust evidence as to the main fact of which all living Christians of that day must have had the most overwhelming evidence, because one or two tradi- tions subsequently found their way into the Gospel narratives which look like scattered individual reminiscences, rather than an enumeration of the chief links in the chain of evidence.
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