(1) The establishment of the date of the document against tradition and general air, by allusion discovered within it.
(2) The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical, and therefore necessarily anterior to the document.
(3) The supposition that religious emotion, or indeed emotion of any kind, vitiates record.
(4) The admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence to destroy the reader's general judgment.
(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging.
Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about, called _The Path to Rome_. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.
This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.
"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the conclusion that the so-called _Path to Rome_ is composed of three distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233 _et seq._ for [Greek: theta]. For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)
Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions which the other has incorporated in his _Neo-Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century_.
The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of A.D. 2208, and a doubtful superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs. (Mk. 2) Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations: