The courts go farther than this. They say, "If a witness swear positively that he saw or heard a fact, and another _who was present_ that he did not see or hear it, and the witnesses are equally faithworthy, the affirmative witness is to be believed" (_Decisions of the Supreme Court of Errors of the State of Connecticut_, vol. vi. p. 188). In the case referred to in that decision the court set aside a verdict that had been rendered by the lower court on the negative testimony of eleven witnesses against the positive testimony of three. The principle recognized by that decision, and which is universally accepted as law, is that the negative testimony of witnesses present at any given transaction cannot set aside the positive testimony of a far less number of witnesses, or even of a single reliable witness. The silence of any of the evangelists in reference to an incident or event at which they may have been present, but which possibly they may not have noticed or which they do not record, does not contradict in the least the testimony of _one_ who says such an incident occurred. The fact of the marriage in Cana is not at all disturbed because John is the only witness who testifies to it. So if one writer states a part of an incident or of a discourse which another writer omits, while the latter gives a part which the first omits, there is no contradiction. Matthew (xx. 20) says the mother of Zebedee's children made a certain request which Mark (x. 35) says the children themselves made. But this is not inconsistent: the children united with the mother in the request. Matthew calls attention to one party; Mark, to another. Nothing can be more unreasonable than the cavil that stumbles at such difficulties. The rule before us applies to that extraordinary doubt of modern criticism--whether the Israelites were ever in Egypt, because, as affirmed, the monuments do not record their presence nor their flight nor the destruction of the Egyptian host at the Red Sea. Now, leaving out of the argument the strong probability that the monuments do refer to their presence in Egypt, and the further probability that the Egyptians would not be likely to preserve on their monuments the record of their own ignominy and overthrow, the objection could not stand for a moment in any court of justice in the presence of the positive testimony of the record to the history in Egypt--all the more as this testimony is sustained by an extraordinary weight of incidental corroborative evidence, and is involved in the whole subsequent history of the nation.