Dion
Cassius, from the consulships of Antistius and Balbus to those of
Messala and Cinna--that is, for five years before and five years after
the birth of Christ--is lost; as also Livy's history of the same period.
It is certain that some one did record the fact, for Suidas, in his
lexicon upon the word _apographe_, says, "that Augustus sent twenty
select men into all the provinces of the empire to take a census, both
of men and property, and commanded that a just proportion of the latter
should be brought into the imperial treasury. And this was the first
census."

To object to the gospel history, that everything contained in it of the
doings of Christ and his apostles in Judea, is not recorded by the
historians of Greece and Italy, is much the same as to say that there
are a multitude of facts recorded in D'Aubigne's History of the
Reformation in Germany, of which Hume and Macaulay make no mention in
their histories of England. How should they?--treating of different
countries, and for the most part of different periods, and writing civil
and not church history? Does anybody go to Macaulay to look for the
history of the Westminster Assembly, or to Bancroft for an account of
the Great Revival in New England? Or is the veracity of Baillie, or
Edwards suspected, because political history does not concern itself
much about religion? It is enough that not a single statement of the
gospel history has ever been disproved.

I might give you quotations from the enemies of the Christian faith,
from Josephus the Jew, and Celsus, and Porphyry, heathen philosophers,
and from the Emperor Julian, the apostate--who, having been raised a
Christian, became a heathen, and used all his ingenuity to overturn the
religion of Christ--expressly admitting the principal miracles recorded
in the gospel. But I attach no such importance to the testimony of this
class of persons as to suppose that it should be placed, for one moment,
on a level with the testimony of the apostles, or that their testimony
to the facts of the life and death of Christ needs any confirmation from
such witnesses. We have such overwhelming evidence of the sincerity and
truth of the witnesses chosen by God to bear testimony to the
resurrection of Christ, as we never can have of the credibility of any
secular historian whatever.

You will remember that these are the writers whose accounts of the
existence, the faith and worship, the numbers and morals of the
Christian