shown that it is possible to prove beyond dispute that an early document is genuine ; and the uncertainty of history was a welcome ally to those who resisted the tests of truth that were taught by the Cartesian and the inductive philosophers. Abbot Hirnhaim wrote : "Nihili curanda est nobis hominum authoritas, quos constat plerumque falsitatis esse authores. — Diminutae sunt veritates a filiis hominum, et de ipsa veritate vix aliquid veri tenemus. — Nec mundus regitur scientiis sed opinionibus." Some hoped or professed to elevate spiritual authority by the repression of human testimony ; and Huet, with the name and aspect of a Christian apologist and divine, wrote things that might have gone into the article "Pyrrhonisme ": "Il ne se trouve point de faculté naturelle par laquelle on puisse découvrir la vérité avec une pleine et entière assurance." There were men who, anticipating a controversy which reappeared at the cradle of statistical science, declared that the evidences of Christianity would become invalid by lapse of time, and would expire about the year 3154 — or, as it came to be amended, in 1789. To this scepticism Mabillon offered the remedy of criticism ; and his great quality is that the criticism he founded was constructive and did not rest at the exposure of error. M. de Broglie adopts a saying of Leibnitz, that the defence of history was really a defence of religion. Mabillon's antagonist in the endeavour to drown history in legend, the Bollandist Papebroeck, was convinced by the treatise De Re Diplomatica ; and its doctrine, less opposed at the time than that of Simon or of Newton, has remained unshaken and as fruitful as theirs. It covered a small part of a very large field, leaving much for later determination. Thierry says, with more or less justice, of Guizot : "Il a ouvert, comme historien de nos vieilles institutions, l'ère de la science proprement dite ; avant lui, Montesquieu seul excepté, il n'y avait eu que des systèmes." What Mabillon did was to pass from fiction to reality, not from system to science.
My own copies, made many years ago from the manuscripts which M. de Broglie has consulted, do not authorise
