ly, as ancient as the
accounts themselves; if we had no visible effects connected with the
history, no subsequent or collateral testimony to confirm it; under
these circumstances I think that it would be undeserving of credit. But
this certainly is not our case. In appreciating the evidence of
Christianity, the books are to be combined with the institution; with
the prevalency of the religion at this day; with the time and place of
its origin, which are acknowledged points; with the circumstances of its
rise and progress, as collected from external history; with the fact of
our present books being received by the votaries of the institution from
the beginning; with that of other books coming after these, filled with
accounts of effects and consequences resulting from the transaction, or
referring to the transaction, or built upon it; lastly, with the
consideration of the number and variety of the books themselves, the
different writers from which they proceed, the different views with
which they were written, so disagreeing as to repel the suspicion of
confederacy, so agreeing as to show that they were founded in a common
original, i. e. in a story substantially the same. Whether this proof be
satisfactory or not, it is properly a cumulation of evidence, by no
means a naked or solitary record.

V. A mark of historical truth, although only a certain way, and to a
certain degree, is particularity in names, dates, places, circumstances,
and in the order of events preceding or following the transaction: of
which kind, for instance, is the particularity in the description of St.
Paul's voyage and shipwreck, in the 27th chapter of the Acts, which no
man, I think, can read without being convinced that the writer was
there; and also in the account of the cure and examination of the blind
man in the 9th chapter of St. John's Gospel, which bears every mark of
personal knowledge on the part of the historian. (Both these chapters
ought to be read for the sake of this very observation.) I do not deny
that fiction has often the particularity of truth; but then it is of
studied and elaborate fiction, or of a formal attempt to deceive, that
we observe this. Since, however, experience proves that particularity is
not confined to truth, I have stated that it is a proof of truth only to
a certain extent, i. e. it reduces the question to this, whether we can
depend or not upon the probity of the relater? which is a considerable
advance in