llustration of this position I
wrote a special essay about the miracles reported by Eginhard.[115]

In truth, one need go no further than Mr. Gladstone's sixth
proposition to be convinced that contemporary testimony, even of
well-known and distinguished persons, may be but a very frail reed for
the support of the historian, when theological prepossession blinds
the witness.[116]

PROP. 7. _And he treats the entire question, in the narrowed form in
which it arises upon secular testimony, as if it were capable of a
solution so clear and summary as to warrant the use of the extremest
weapons of controversy against those who presume to differ from him._

The six heretical propositions which have gone before are enunciated
with sufficient clearness to enable me to prove, without any
difficulty, that, whosesoever they are, they are not mine. But number
seven, I confess, is too hard for me. I cannot undertake to contradict
that which I do not understand.

What is the "entire question" which "arises" in a "narrowed form" upon
"secular testimony"? After much guessing, I am fain to give up the
conundrum. The "question" may be the ownership of the pigs; or the
ethnological character of the Gadarenes; or the propriety of meddling
with other people's property without legal warrant. And each of these
questions might be so "narrowed" when it arose on "secular testimony"
that I should not know where I was. So I am silent on this part of the
proposition.

But I do dimly discern, in the latter moiety of this mysterious
paragraph, a reproof of that use of "the extremest weapons of
controversy" which is attributed to me. Upon which I have to observe
that I guide myself, in such matters, very much by the maxim of a
great statesman, "Do ut des." If Mr. Gladstone objects to the
employment of such weapons of defence, he would do well to abstain
from them in attack. He should not frame charges which he has,
afterwards, to admit are erroneous, in language of carefully
calculated offensiveness ("Impregnable Rock," pp. 269-70); he should
not assume that persons with whom he disagrees are so recklessly
unconscientious as to evade the trouble of inquiring what has been
said or known about a grave question ("Impregnable Rock," p. 273); he
should not qualify the results of careful thought as "hand-over-head
reasoning" ("Impregnable Rock," p. 274); he should not, as in the
extraordinary propositions which I have just analysed, make assertions
re