Sir H. S. Maine’s “Village Communities.”
The Archbishop of Westminster’s paper, read before the Royal Institution, “On the Dæmon of Socrates.”
“Orsini’s Life of the Blessed Virgin,” translated by the Very Rev. Dr Husenbeth.
“Hints and Facts on the Origin of Man,” by the Very Rev. Dr P. Melia, 1872, who says (p. 59), “Considering the great length of life of the first patriarchs, Moses must have had every information through non-interrupted tradition. If we reflect that Shem for many years saw Methuselah, a contemporary of Adam, and that Shem himself lived to the time of Abraham, ... that Abraham died after the birth of Jacob, and that Jacob saw many who were alive when Moses was born, we see that a few generations connect Moses not only with Noah, but also with Adam.” I quote this passage as it is important to place in the foreground of this inquiry the unassailable truth that (apart from revelation) the historical account of the origin of the human race, to which all others converge, is consistent with itself, and bears intrinsic evidence of credibility.
An analogous argument with reference to Christian tradition was sketched in a lecture by Mr Edward Lucas, and published in 1862, “On the First Two Centuries of Christianity.”
With reference to other parts of these pages, much supplemental matter will be found in—
“Historical Illustrations of the Old Testament,” by the Rev. G. Rawlinson, M.A., Camden Prof., where, at pp. 19, 20, will be found direct testimony to what I had conjectured from indirect evidence at pp. 270, 271—viz., that the Polynesian islanders “have a clear and distinct tradition of a Deluge, from which one family only, eight in number, was saved in a canoe.”
Also, but from a different point of view, in “Legends of Old Testament Characters,” by Rev. S. Baring Gould, M.A.
The articles in the Tablet “On Arbitration instead of War,” to which I have referred in chap. xiv. at p. 380, have recently been collected and reprinted by Lord Robert Montagu, M.P.
If I have exceeded in quotation, I must direct my readers, for the defence of this mode of composition, from the point of view of tradition, to a work which I trust some in this busy age still find leisure to read, Mr Kenelm Digby’s “Mores Catholici,” i. 40.