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If these documents, that I confide to your hands, and to yours only, will not remove every doubt as to the truth of my assertions, afford me but a little time, till I can send to London, and every point shall be satisfactorily cleared up." He then placed in Lord Whiffledale's hands the papers that had been so convincing to Dr Thompson.
As this method has been often attended with good success, we beg leave to lay some of his stories before the public, and humbly request those who shall find them rather extravagant and bordering upon the marvellous, which will require but a very moderate share of common sense, to exercise the same upon every occurrence of life, and chiefly upon our English politics, in which old habits and bold assertions, set off by eloquent speeches and supported by constitutional mobs, associations, volunteers, and foreign influence, have of late, we apprehend, but too successfully turned our brains, and made us the laughing-stock of Europe, and of France and Holland in particular.
It has been said that the catacombs were in part the work of the heathen, and that the Christians made use of excavations which they found ready to their hand. Such and other similar assertions have been put forward with great confidence; but there is one overwhelming and complete answer to all such doubts, a visit to the catacombs themselves.
"Taou Yuen Ammidon," the elder pronounced experimentally. "It doesn't sound right, the two won't go together." "But they have," Gerrit declared. He thought impatiently that he must listen to a repetition of Rhoda's assertions. "I don't know much about 'em," Jeremy proceeded.
This method of watching, or rather of originating, a conflict of assertions, not for the purpose of finally deciding in favour of either side, but to discover whether the object of the struggle is not a mere illusion, which each strives in vain to reach, but which would be no gain even when reached this procedure, I say, may be termed the sceptical method.
Some years ago, giraffes were thought to be fabulous animals; and the ill-treated Le Vaillant was supposed to have invented them, in spite of the description which the Romans left of them. He was a little poetical in his style of writing, which John Bull is not fond of when facts are narrated, so John Bull begged to doubt his assertions.
If any man dared to contradict my opinions I called him a dunce, a rascal, a villain, and frightened him out of his wits. Virgil. But what said others to this method of disputation? Scaliger. They generally believed me because of the confidence of my assertions, and thought I could not be so insolent or so angry if I was not absolutely sure of being in the right.
The later Christian writers, while they allude with unseemly exultation to the overthrow of one inveterate enemy by another who proved himself in the end not less inveterate, affirmed that the barbarities of the Jewish leader were mainly directed against themselves. On such interested assertions we shall place little reliance.
I was about to answer in general medical terms, not daring to venture any positive assertions, when the distant sound of the bell at the gate fell upon our ears. "Visitors," said Sperver. There was a moment's silence. "Go and see who it is," said Odile, whose brow was for a minute shaded with anxiety. "How can one be hospitable to strangers at such a time? It is hardly possible!"
They never set up any defence, excepting when they are in the wrong, and in this proceeding they are pre-eminent, knowing how to oppose arguments by precedents, proofs by assertions, and thus they very often obtain victory in minor matters of detail. They see and know with admirable penetration, when one of them presents to another a weapon which she herself is forbidden to whet.
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