his “reasons” for the existence of only four Gospels; and of such calm and dispassionate judges as Tertullian, with his “Credo quia impossibile”:  the marvel is that the selection which constitutes our New Testament is as free as it is from obviously objectionable matter.  The apocryphal Gospels certainly deserve to be apocryphal; but one may suspect that a little more critical discrimination would have enlarged the Apocrypha not inconsiderably.

At this point a very obvious objection arises and deserves full and candid consideration.  It may be said that critical scepticism carried to the length suggested is historical pyrrhonism; that if we are altogether to discredit an ancient or a modern historian, because he has assumed fabulous matter to be true, it will be as well to give up paying any attention to history.  It may be said, and with great justice, that Eginhard’s “Life of Charlemagne” is none the less trustworthy because of the astounding revelation of credulity, of lack of judgment, and even of respect for the eighth commandment, which he has unconsciously made in the “History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs Marcellinus and Paul.”  Or, to go no further back than the last number of the Nineteenth Century, surely that excellent lady, Miss Strickland, is not to be refused all credence, because of the myth about the second James’s remains which she seems to have unconsciously invented.

Of course this is perfectly true.  I am afraid there is no man alive whose witness could be accepted, if the condition precedent were proof that he had never invented and promulgated a myth.  In the minds of all of us there are little places here and there, like the indistinguishable spots on a rock which give foothold to moss or stonecrop; on which, if the germ of a myth fall, it is certain to grow, without in the least degree affecting our accuracy or truthfulness elsewhere.  Sir Walter Scott knew that he could not repeat a story without, as he said, “giving it a new hat and stick.”  Most of us differ from Sir Walter only in not knowing about this tendency of the mythopoeic faculty to break out unnoticed.  But it is also perfectly true that the mythopoeic faculty is not equally active in all minds, nor in all regions and under all conditions of the same mind.  David Hume was certainly not so liable to temptation as the Venerable Bede, or even as some recent historians who could be mentioned; and the most imaginative of debtors, if he owes five pounds, never makes an obligation to pay a hundred out of it.  The rule of common sense is prima facie to trust a witness in all matters, in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor that love of the marvellous, which is inherent to a greater or less degree in all mankind, are strongly concerned; and, when they are involved, to require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.