"Only that the weapons should be fair?"
"O, of course."
"To resume, then. I say, that, if we were told that last year an event of such a miraculous nature occurred as that the earth did not revolve for twenty-four hours together, we should at once reject it, without any examination of witnesses, or troubling ourselves with any thing of the kind."
"Unquestionably."
"And if it were said to have occurred twenty years ago we should take the same course."
"Certainly."
"And so if any such event were said to have occurred eighteen hundred years ago?"
"Agreed."
"And if such events were said at that day to have occurred eighteen hundred years previously, we believe, of course, the men of that time would have been equally entitled to reason in the same way about them as ourselves; and, in short, that we may fearlessly apply the same principle to the same epoch."
"Of course"