Give the world their letters, and let the grave silence the plaudits and the clamors which deafened the generation among whom they lived, and no man will hesitate whether or not to pronounce Hume a sensualist, or Washington the noblest work of God--an honest man.
If we add another test of truthfulness, by increasing the number of the witnesses, comparing a number of letters referring to the same events, written by persons of various degrees of education, and of different occupations and ranks of life, resident in different countries, acting independently of each other, and find them all agree in their allusions to, or direct mention of, some central facts concerning which they are all interested, no one can rightfully doubt that this undesigned agreement declares the truth.

But if, in addition to all these undesigned coincidences, we happen upon the correspondence of persons whose interests and passions were diametrically opposed to those of our correspondents, and find that, when they have occasion to refer to them, they also confirm the great facts already ascertained, then our belief becomes conviction which can not be overturned by any sophistry, that these things did occur.

If Whig and Tory agree in relating the facts of James' flight, and William's accession, if the letters of his Jacobite friends and those of the French ambassador confirm the statements of the English historian, and if we are put in possession of the letters which James himself wrote from France and Ireland to his friends in England, does any man in his common sense doubt that the Revolution of 1688 did actually occur?
When, in addition to all this concentration and convergence of testimony, one finds that the matters related, being of public concern, and the changes effected for the public weal, the people have ever since observed, and do to this day celebrate, by religious worship and public rejoicings, the anniversaries of the principal events of that Revolution, and that he himself has been present, and has heard the thanksgivings, and witnessed the rejoicings on those anniversaries, the facts of the history come out from the domains of learned curiosity, and take their stand on the market-place of the busy world's engagements.

We become at once conscious that this is a practical question--a great fact which concerns us--that the whole of the law and government of a vast empire has felt its impress--that our ancestors and ourselves have been molded under its influence, and that the religion of Europe and America, under whose guardianship we have grown to a prominent place among the people of earth, and may arrive at a better prominence among the nations of the saved, has been secured by that Revolution.

We could scarcely know whether most to pity or contemn the man who should labor to persuade us that such a Revolution had never occurred, or that the facts had been essentially misrepresented.
Now it is precisely on this kind of evidence that we believe the great facts of the Christian Revolution.