favored by analogy; and that it contradicts all that we know of prehistoric man (p. 40). Thus far it might perhaps be contended in reply, (1) that the preliminary objection to the supernatural is a pure petitio principii, and wholly repugnant to "scientific method"; (2) that it is not inconceivable that revelation might be indefinitely graduated, as well as human knowledge and condition; (3) that it is in no way repugnant to analogy, if the greatest master of analogy, Bishop Cutler,[1] may be heard upon the subject; and (4) that our earliest information about the races from which we are least remote, Aryan, Semitic, Accadian, or Egyptian, offers no contradiction and no obstacle to the idea of their having received, or inherited, portions of some knowledge divinely revealed.
But I do not now enter upon these topics, as I have a more immediate and defined concern with the work of Dr. Réville.
It only came within the last few months to my knowledge that, at a period when my cares and labors of a distinct order were much too absorbing to allow of any attention to archaeological history. Dr. Réville had done me the honor to select me as the representative of those writers who find warrant for the assertion of a primitive revelation in the testimony of the Holy Scriptures.
This is a distinction which I do not at all deserve: first, because Dr. Réville might have placed in the field champions much more competent and learned[2] than myself; secondly, because I have never attempted to give the proof of such a warrant, I have never written ex professo on the subject of it; but it is true that in a work published nearly thirty years ago, when destructive criticism was less advanced than it now is, I assumed it as a thing generally received, at least in this country. Upon some of the points, which group themselves round that assumption, my views, like those of many other inquirers, have been stated more crudely at an early, and more maturely at more than one later period. I admit that variation or development imposes a hardship upon critics, notwithstanding all their desire to be just; especially, may I say, upon such critics as, traversing ground of almost boundless extent, can hardly, except in the rarest cases, be minutely and closely acquainted with every portion of it.
I also admit to Dr. Réville, and indeed I contend by his side, that in an historical inquiry the authority of Scripture can not be alleged in proof of the existence of a primitive revelation. So to allege it is a preliminary assumption of the supernatural, and is in my view a manifest departure from the laws of "scientific" procedure: as palpable a departure, may I venture to say? as that preliminary exclusion of the supernatural which I have already presumed to notice. My own offense, if it be one, was of another character; and was committed in the early days of Homeric study, when my eyes perhaps were dazzled with the amazing richness and variety of the results which reward all close investigation of the text of Homer, so that objects were blurred for a time in my view, which soon came to stand more clear before me.
I had better perhaps state at once what my contention really is. It is, first, that many important pictures drawn, and indications given, in the Homeric poems supply evidence that can not be confuted not only of an ideal but of an historical relationship to the Hebrew traditions, (1) and mainly, as they are recorded in the Book of Genesis; (2) as less authentically to be gathered from the later Hebrew learning; and (3) as illustrated from extraneous sources. Secondly, any attempt to expound the Olympian mythology of Homer by simple reference to a solar theory, or even to Nature-worship in a larger sense, is simply a plea for a verdict against the evidence. It is also true that I have an unshaken belief in a Divine Revelation, not resting on assumption, but made obligatory upon me by reason. But I hold the last of these convictions entirely apart from the others, and I derived the first and second not from preconception, of which I had not a grain, but from the poems themselves, as purely as I derived my knowledge of the Peloponnesian War from Thucydides or his interpreters.
The great importance of this contention I do not deny, I have produced in its favor
