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Crassus taking his sons and his money secretly got away from Rome, whether it was that he really was afraid, or, what is more probable, he wished to give credibility to the calumny and to strengthen the odium against Pompeius.
The unfortunate man is offered any assistance he may require; and when the defence is over, the court is cleared, the doors are shut, and the minutes, which have been taken down by the judge-advocate, are carefully read over, the credibility of the witnesses weighed, and the president puts the question to the youngest member first, "Proved, or not proved?"
I remember I had once occasion to visit one of his dragoons in his last illness at Harborough, and I found the man upon the borders of eternity a circumstance which, as he apprehended himself, must add some peculiar weight and credibility to his discourse.
These strokes of character enable us to understand the man; and I shall now go into the consideration of some of the arguments he has deduced from passages in the Old Testament in support of his opinions; after premising, that the truth of the story of the manner of his conversion depends entirely upon his own assertion; and whether his credibility be absolutely unimpeachable, can be easily determined by an impartial consideration of the history of his conduct already mentioned.
It is unnecessary to say that a fling at a person's previous occupation, or that of his parents an attempt to discredit him, in consequence of his having, at some period of his life, been a mechanic or manufacturer or dropping, or altering a letter in his name, does not amount to much, as an impeachment of his character and credibility, as a man or an author.
The opposite hypothesis of a mere military stratagem or intentional fraud is still more objectionable, and would compel us either to impute to the first Christian emperor, at a venerable age, the double crime of falsehood and perjury, or, if Eusebius invented the story, to deny to the 'father of church history' all claim to credibility and common respectability.
Each one of us, however, has his own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility of a story, and I believe the abbe, the old woman, and many others who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers. One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere drunkenness had in this affair.
Secondly, That whether these miracles were really performed, or not, depends entirely upon the credibility of the authors themselves who have thus quoted! which, as shall be shown hereafter, may be disputed; and, thirdly, it could be retorted upon Protestants, that this same argument is the same in principle with the often refuted popish argumentation.
Without attempting to maintain the credibility of this writer's history as a whole, I cannot but think that he has given us satisfactory grounds for believing that the ruined cities of Central America were built by a race which flourished long before the Toltecs; that they were already declining in power and civilization in the seventh century, when the Toltecs began to flourish in Mexico; and that the present Mayas of Yucatan are their degenerate descendants.
A traveller named Burnaby tells of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.
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