So far from setting aside the authority of the synoptics on "subjective" grounds, I have taken a great deal of trouble to show that my non-belief in the story is based upon what appears to me to be evident; firstly, that the accounts of the three synoptic Gospels are not independent, but are founded upon a common source; secondly, that, even if the story of the common tradition proceeded from a contemporary, it would still be
worthy of very little credit, seeing the manner in which the legends about mediæval miracles have been propounded by contemporaries. And in illustration 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 respecting his opponent's position and arguments which are contradicted by the plainest facts.
Persons who, like myself, have spent their lives outside the political world, yet take a mild and philosophical concern in what goes on in it, often find it difficult to understand what our neighbours call the psychological moment of this or that party leader, and are, occasionally, loth to believe in the seeming conditions of certain kinds of success. And when some chieftain, famous in political warfare, adventures into the region of letters or of science, in full confidence that the methods which have brought fame and honour in
his own province will answer there, he is apt to forget that he will be judged by these people, on whom rhetorical artifices have long ceased to take effect; and to whom mere dexterity in putting together cleverly ambiguous phrases, and even the great art of offensive misrepresentation, are unspeakably wearisome. And, if that weariness finds its expression in sarcasm, the offender really has no right to cry out. Assuredly ridicule is no test of truth, but it is the righteous meed of some kinds of error. Nor ought the attempt to confound the expression of a revolted sense of fair dealing with arrogant impatience of contradiction, to restrain those to whom "the extreme weapons of controversy" come handy from using them. The function of police in the intellectual, if not in the civil, economy may sometimes be legitimately discharged by volunteers.