United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure of Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a subject of controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to have lived some 300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in minutest detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember as mentioned earlier in this book that it was more than five hundred years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish the date of that birth and that then a purely mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and the general standard of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like Syria, and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous or imaginative; why, then the legendary theory does not seem so improbable.
Without questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of these spokesmen in the German community.
But, in the times I speak of, all was mysterious: the powers of men were subject to no recognised laws: and therefore nothing that imagination could suggest, exceeded the bounds of credibility.
I next read Adam Clarke's Commentary, where I found, besides his arguments for the existence of God, abundance of quotations from Paley, Lardner, Michælis, and others, on the credibility of the New Testament history, and the truth of Christianity. His a priori argument for the existence of God seemed only a play on words. His other arguments were much the same as Watson's.
But by putting it, whether instinctively or deliberately, on a lower plane of credibility than the main action, the poet obeys his deepest and gravest necessity: the necessity of keeping his poem emphatically an affair of recognizable human events. It is of man, and man's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of the purpose of gods.
It occurs to me, a propos of Fra Egidio, to make the obvious statement that an account of an occurrence is not necessarily true, because it happened long ago. Credibility does not improve, like violins and port wine, with lapse of years.
In spite of the ruling of the magistrate that Mr. Clegg had put forward quite enough, if true, to damage Mrs. Dyson's credibility, he continued to press her as to her authorship of these notes and letters, but Mrs. Dyson was firm in her repudiation of them.
The next particular mentioned by Agatharcides, respecting the Abyssinian coast of the Red Sea, is very conclusive, with respect to his accuracy and credibility.
The poet ought at least to have given a credibility to the magnanimity which he ascribes to him, by investing him with a celebrated historical name, such as that of the Saracen monarch Saladin, well known for his nobleness and liberality of sentiment. But all our sympathy inclines to the oppressed Christian and chivalrous side, and the glorious names to which it is appropriated.
These cases alone might suffice to demonstrate the inevitable tendency of slavery as it exists in our colonies, to brutalize the master to a truly frightful degree a degree which would often cast into the shade even the atrocities related in the narrative of Mary Prince; and which are sufficient to prove, independently of all other evidence, that there is nothing in the revolting character of the facts to affect their credibility; but that on the contrary, similar deeds are at this very time of frequent occurrence in almost every one of our slave colonies.
Word Of The Day