I shall now proceed to establish that the strictly historical testimony, and the direct historical evidence, is strikingly concurrent in favour of the scriptural chronology, allowing the margin of difference between the Hebrew and LXX. versions.[48] [48] "Aucune des trois chronologies bibliques, là ou elles ne s'accordent pas entre elles, ne s'impose avec une autorite suffisante soit au fidele, soit au savant. L'Eglise catholique a laissé le choix libre entre ces chronologies et elles n'oblige pas même à en adopter une."--_"Le Monde et L'Homme Primitif selon la Bible," par Mgr. Meignan, Evêque de Chalons-sur-Marne_, 1869. With this view I shall successively examine the chronology of the principal nations whose annals profess to go back to the commencement of things--the Aryan (including the Indian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman), the Babylonian, the Chinese, Phoenician, and Egyptian. _Indian Chronology._--There was a time when the Indian (Aryan) chronology was believed to attain to the most remote antiquity of all, and this belief was sustained by the apparently irrefragable testimony of astronomical evidence. Who upholds this evidence now? On this head I must refer to Cardinal Wiseman's seventh lecture ("On Science and Revealed Religion"), where the reader will find a clear and careful _precis_ of the discussion on the subject between Bailly and Delambre, the _Edinburgh Review_ and Bentley, to which I am not aware that anything of consequence has to be added. If, on the other hand, we turn to what I am exclusively directing my attention--the strict historical investigation--we find that the cautious inquiries of such men as Sir W. Jones and Heeren concur in placing the Aryan invasion at the antecedently very probable date, from the point of view of Scripture, of some 2000 years B.C. At the present moment the discussion takes the form of philological inquiry, and into the antiquity (upon internal evidence) of the ancient Sanscrit literature. In so far, therefore, as it is philological, it belongs to the indirect argument, which I am now excluding. In so far as the Sanscrit literature is historical, I have discussed the testimony which it brings in the preceding chapter. Professor Rawlinson, however, in his recent "Manual of Ancient History," refuses to discuss the question, as he does not regard the Maha-Bharata and Ramayana as "trustworthy sources of history," and commences his Persian history with the accession of Cyrus, previously to which he does not consider the Aryan migration and settlement to have been completed. Apart, then, from the peculiar line of argument to which I shall presently refer, it would appear that the Indian chronology, as reconstructed from history and tradition, falls easily within the lines, not only of the LXX., but of the Hebrew version.