e. in a story substantially the same. Whether this proof be
satisfactory or not, it is properly a cumulation of evidence, by no
means a naked or solitary record.
V. A mark of historical truth, although only a certain way, and to a
certain degree, is particularity in names, dates, places, circumstances,
and in the order of events preceding or following the transaction: of
which kind, for instance, is the particularity in the description of St.
Paul's voyage and shipwreck, in the 27th chapter of the Acts, which no
man, I think, can read without being convinced that the writer was
there; and also in the account of the cure and examination of the blind
man in the 9th chapter of St. John's Gospel, which bears every mark of
personal knowledge on the part of the historian. (Both these chapters
ought to be read for the sake of this very observation.) I do not deny
that fiction has often the particularity of truth; but then it is of
studied and elaborate fiction, or of a formal attempt to deceive, that
we observe this. Since, however, experience proves that particularity is
not confined to truth, I have stated that it is a proof of truth only to
a certain extent, i.
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