:44) has been explained away as a Christian
interpolation, or, more gaily, by reviving the wild notion that
Poggio Bracciolini forged the whole of the "Annals". But such
trifling with history and literature does not serve. No scholar
accepts the theory about Poggio--and yet if the passage about Christ
is to be got rid of, this is the better way of the two; for there is
nothing to countenance the view that the chapter is interpolated, or
to explain when or by whom it was done--the wish is father to the
thought. Christians are twice mentioned by Suetonius in dealing with
Emperors of the first century, though in one passage the reading
"Chrestus" for "Christus" has suggested to some scholars that
another man is meant; the confusion was a natural one and is
instanced elsewhere, but we need not press the matter. The argument
from silence is generally recognized as an uncertain one. Sir James
Melville, living at the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, does not, I
learn, mention John Knox--"whom he could not have failed to mention
if Knox had really existed and played the part assigned to him by
his partisans," and so forth. It might be as possible and as
reasonable to prove that the Brahmo Samaj never existed, by
demonstrating four hundred years hence--or two thousand--that it is
not mentioned in In Memoriam, nor in The Ring and the Book, nor in
George Meredith's, novels, nor (more strangely) in any of Mr.
Kipling's surviving works, which definitely deal with India. None of
these writers, it may be replied, had any concern to mention the
Brahmo Samaj. And when one surveys the Greek and Roman writers of
the first century A.D. which of them had any concern to refer to
Jesus and his disciples, beyond the historians who do? Indeed, the
difficulty is to understand why some of these men should have
written at all; harder still, why others should have wanted to read
their poems and orations and commonplace books. One argument,
advanced in India a few years ago, against the historical value of
the Gospels may be revived by way of illustration. Would not Virgil
and Horace, it was asked, have taken notice of the massacre at
Bethlehem, if it was historical? Would they not? it was replied,
when they both had died years before its traditional date.

But the distinction between Christian and secular writers is not one
that will weigh much with a serious historian. Until we have reason
to distinguish between book and book, the evidence must be