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battle of Pavia, Tout est perdu for s Vhonneur , turns out to have 
been Vhonneur et la vie qui est saulve , which deprives it of all 
its point. As to the story of the chivalrous interchange of 
courtesies between the English and French guards at the battle 
of Fontenoy, “ Monsieur, bid your men fire/* “ No, sir, we 
never fire first,” — Carlyle says, in his Life of Frederick the 
Great (vol. iv. p. 119), “ It is almost a pity to disturb an 
elegant historical passage of this kind circulating round the 
world in some glory for a century past ; but there has a 
small irrefragable document come to me which modifies it a 
good deal, and reduces matters to the business form.” This 
document is a letter from Lord Charles Hay, lieutenant- 
colonel of the Guards, written or dictated about three weeks 
after the battle, and giving an account of what happened. In 
this no mention is made of the occurrence, and we may confi- 
dently believe with Carlyle, that u the French mess-rooms (with 
their eloquent talent that way) had rounded off the thing into 
the current epigrammatic redaction.” 
We all know how French historians, including M. Thiers, 
repeat the story of Le Vengeur refusing to strike her flag in 
the action of the 1st of June, 1794, and going down into the 
depths of the ocean while her crew shouted Vive la Republique ! 
This has been shown by Admiral Griffiths, who was living in 
1838, one of the few survivors of the engagement, and who 
wrote a letter on the subject, to be as he calls it “ a ridi- 
culous piece of nonsense.” When the Vengeur sank, the action 
had ceased for some time. She had been taken possession of by 
the boats of the Culloden ; and as to the crew, Admiral Grif- 
fiths says, “ never were men in distress more ready to save 
themselves.” There was “not one shout beyond that of horror 
and despair.” And yet the lie will live in the annals of French 
heroism, and will perhaps be believed to the end of time. — See 
Carlyle's Essays , vol. v. pp. 356-359. 
Before I conclude I will, with reference to the special 
objects of this Institute, state in as terse a form as possible the 
reasons why we are justified in believing on historical grounds 
the truth of the narratives in the New Testament, excluding all 
consideration of its doctrines : — 
(1.) The contemporary nature of the testimony. 
(2.) The artlessness and apparent truthfulness of the writers. 
(3.) The substantial agreement, together with the circum- 
stantial variety of the statements, of four different 
contemporary eye-witnesses. 
(4.) The undesigned coincidences which exist between the 
Gospels and Acts on the one hand and the Epistles 
on the other. 
