Witticism

A passage in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited...begins: “though God cannot alter the past, historians can . . . ”.

This witticism in fact came originally from Butler’s friend Henry Festing Jones.

In Further Extracts from the Notebooks of Samuel Butler, Butler recorded a conversation with Jones under the heading “HISTORIANS”: “I said to Jones that whatever else God can do he cannot alter the past. Jones replied, ‘No doubt that is the reason why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians’”.

JAMES W. THIRSK
1 Hadlow Castle, Hadlow, Tonbridge