If the historian acknowledge himself to have received his intelligence from others, the particularity of the narrative shows, prima facie, the accuracy of his inquiries, and the fulness of his information.  This remark belongs to St. Luke’s history.  Of the particularity which we allege, many examples may be found in all the Gospels.  And it is very difficult to conceive that such numerous particularities as are almost everywhere to be met with in the Scriptures should be raised out of nothing, or be spun out of the imagination without any fact to go upon.*

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* “There is always some truth where there are considerable particularities related, and they always seem to bear some proportion to one another.  Thus, there is a great want of the particulars of time, place, and persons in Manetho’s account of the Egyptian Dynasties, Etesias’s of the Assyrian Kings, and those which the technical chronologers have given of the ancient kingdoms of Greece; and, agreeably thereto, the accounts have much fiction and falsehood, with some truth:  whereas Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, and Caesar’s of the War in Gaul, in both which the particulars of time, place, and persons are mentioned, are universally esteemed true to a great degree of exactness.”  Hartley, vol. ii. p. 109. _________

It is to be remarked, however, that this particularity is only to be looked for in direct history.  It is not natural in references or allusions, which yet, in other respects, often afford, as far as they go, the most unsuspicious evidence.

VI.  We lay out of the case such stories of supernatural events as require, on the part of the hearer, nothing more than an otiose assent; stories upon which nothing depends, in which no interest is involved, nothing is to be done or changed in consequence of believing them.  Such stories are credited, if the careless assent that is given to them deserve that name, more by the indolence of the hearer, than by his judgment:  or, though not much credited, are passed from one to another without inquiry or resistance.  To this case, and to this case alone, belongs what is called the love of the marvellous.  I have never known it carry men further.  Men do not suffer persecution from the love of the marvellous.  Of the indifferent nature we are speaking of are most vulgar errors and popular superstition:  most, for instance, of the current reports of apparitions.  Nothing depends upon their being true or false.  But not, surely, of this kind were the alleged miracles of Christ and his apostles.  They decided, if true, the most important question upon which the human mind can fix its anxiety.  They claimed to regulate the opinions of mankind upon subjects in which they are not only deeply concerned, but usually refractory and obstinate.  Men could not be utterly careless in such a case as this.  If a Jew took up the story, he found his darling partiality to his own nation and law wounded;