242 
Now, Petrarch died in 1374, and Tasso published his Gerusa- 
lemme Liberata in 1581 ! 
This is very different from any argument against the 
genuineness of a fact founded merely on discrepancies of state- 
ment. A curious instance of this occurs in the accounts 
given of the execution of the Earl of Argyle in 1661. Claren- 
don says that he was condemned to be hanged, and executed. 
Burnet and Echard say that he was beheaded. This has been 
made use of by Paley, in his Evidences of the Christian Reli- 
gion , with reference to the variance in the statements of the 
Evangelists as to the circumstances of the Crucifixion. No 
one doubts that Argyle was executed, which is the important 
fact; and there would be still less reason to doubt the fact 
of the Crucifixion, however the Evangelists may differ in minute 
details. It is, of course, a difficulty in the way of those who 
assert the literal and verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, but 
that is a subject foreign to my purpose, and too large to be 
dealt with by a passing notice in such an address as this. 
It is a strange paradox that the belief of some writers 
and many readers seems to increase in the inverse ratio of the 
probabilities of the case. How else can we account for the 
fact that the more history recedes into the darkness of the past, 
bold statements are received with unquestioning credulity. 
Thus Dr. Hales in his work on chronology assures us that the 
thirty reigns of the Athenian kings and archons from Cecrops 
to Creon, form “one of the most authentic and correct docu- 
ments to be found in the whole range of profane chronology, 
— the truth being that the reigns of the lungs are little better 
than fabulous; and Bunsen, in his Egypt's Place m Universal 
History , undertakes to reconstruct the authentic chronology 
of E^-ypt for a period of nearly 4,000 years before Christ, 
and “to restore to the ancient history of the world the 
vital energy of which it has been so long deprived, although 
his chief authorities, independently of some monumental 
inscriptions, are Eratosthenes and Manetho, writers who lived 
more than 3,000 years after the period which they are sup- 
posed to authenticate. Now Manetho composed his history 
from two sources, temple registers and popular legends. I need 
say nothing about the latter, but what possible ground have we 
for believing that their priest-kept registers contained true 
accounts of events that happened thirty or forty centuries before 
the historian inspected them? Eratosthenes, at the request ot 
Ptolemy, drew up a listof thirty- eight Theban lung, occupying 
a period of more than a thousaud years : and it is sufficient to say 
with Mr. Grote that he “delivered positive opinions upon a 
point on which no sufficient data was accessible, and therefore 
