A remarkable illustration of the power of a missing fact occurs in the history of the overthrow of Babylon itself. The Scripture account (Dan. v.) says that Belshazzar was king of Babylon, that he was in the city, engaged in a feast, at the time of its capture, and that he was slain. Reliable secular historians give the name of the king as Nabonnedus or Labynetus, and state that he was not in the city when it was captured, that he was not killed, but taken prisoner, kindly treated and allowed to retire to private life. These different accounts were not only eagerly seized upon by skeptics as proofs of the error of the Scriptures, but even biblical scholars admitted them to be incapable of reconciliation. No longer ago than when the writer was in the theological seminary that prince of biblical students, Addison Alexander, said that no solution of the difficulty was known; he was too wise a man to say that no solution was possible. Kitto, in his _Cyclopedia_, declared that no hypothesis _could_ harmonize the accounts. Yet the reconciliation was perfectly simple. A cylinder of historic records discovered by Sir Henry Rawlinson in the ruins of Lower Babylon showed that there were at this time two kings of Babylon, a father and a son. One was occupying a stronghold near the city, the other was defending the city itself; the latter was taken and slain, the former was spared. Thus, by the providential bringing to light of a fact buried for centuries, that which had seemed to be, and which had repeatedly and triumphantly been proclaimed to be, and which had been given up _as_ being, an irreconcilable contradiction, was shown to be perfectly harmonious. Yet if the hypothesis of two kings had been suggested as an explanation before the discovery of the fact, it would have been hissed out of court by the whole skeptical school. The two accounts of the death of Judas have not passed out of the field of popular objection. Matthew (xxvii. 5) says he committed suicide; Luke (Acts i. 18) says he fell headlong and burst asunder. He does not say where he fell from or what were the circumstances of the fall, and it is certainly not impossible, or even improbable, that both accounts are true. The traitor hung himself, possibly, on the verge of a precipice--the supposed spot furnishes all the conditions for this--and afterward (how long is not said) the rope or the limb of the tree gave way, and he fell, striking first on the rocks at the foot of the tree and then plunging over the precipice with the result described by Luke.