Upon the evidence of a copy of its own records, the originals having been lost, the House of Lords decided a claim to the peerage; see Starkie on Evidence, 51. There is no manuscript of Sophocles earlier than the tenth century, while at least two manuscripts of the N. T. go back to the fourth century. Frederick George Kenyon, Handbook to Textual Criticism of N. T.: “We owe our knowledge of most of the great works of Greek and Latin literature—Æschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Horace, Lucretius, Tacitus, and many more—to manuscripts written from 900 to 1500 years after their authors’ deaths; while of the N. T. we have two excellent and approximately complete copies at an interval of only 250 years. Again, of the classical writers we have as a rule only a few score of copies (often less), of which one or two stand out as decisively superior to all the rest; but of the N. T. we have more than 3000 copies (besides a very large number of versions), and many of these have distinct and independent value.” The mother of Tischendorf named him Lobgott, because her fear that her babe would be born blind had not come true. No man ever had keener sight than he. He spent his life in deciphering old manuscripts which other eyes could not read. The Sinaitic manuscript which he discovered takes us back within three centuries of the time of the apostles. (_c_) In determining matters of fact, after the lapse of considerable time, documentary evidence is to be allowed greater weight than oral testimony. Neither memory nor tradition can long be trusted to give absolutely correct accounts of particular facts. The New Testament documents, therefore, are of greater weight in evidence than tradition would be, even if only thirty years had elapsed since the death of the actors in the scenes they relate. See Starkie on Evidence, 51, 730. The Roman Catholic Church, in its legends of the saints, shows how quickly mere tradition can become corrupt. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, yet sermons preached to-day on the anniversary of his birth make him out to be Unitarian, Universalist, or Orthodox, according as the preacher himself believes. 2. As to testimony in general. (_a_) In questions as to matters of fact, the proper inquiry is not whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true. It is unfair, therefore, to allow our examination of the Scripture witnesses to be prejudiced by suspicion, merely because their story is a sacred one.