A slight amount of positive testimony, so long as it is uncontradicted, outweighs a very great amount of testimony that is merely negative. The silence of a second witness, or his testimony that he did not see a certain alleged occurrence, cannot counterbalance the positive testimony of a first witness that he did see it. We should therefore estimate the silence of profane writers with regard to facts narrated in Scripture precisely as we should estimate it if the facts about which they are silent were narrated by other profane writers, instead of being narrated by the writers of Scripture.
Egyptian monuments make no mention of the destruction of Pharaoh and his army; but then, Napoleon’s dispatches also make no mention of his defeat at Trafalgar. At the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides of Paris, the walls are inscribed with the names of a multitude of places where his battles were fought, but Waterloo, the scene of his great defeat, is not recorded there. So Sennacherib, in all his monuments, does not refer to the destruction of his army in the time of Hezekiah. Napoleon gathered 450,000 men at Dresden to invade Russia. At Moscow the soft-falling snow conquered him. In one night 20,000 horses perished with cold. Not without reason at Moscow, on the annivesary of the retreat of the French, the exultation of the prophet over the fall of Sennacherib is read in the churches.
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1907), p. 143.