The business of the modern historian is to survey with comprehensive eye, to digest, to reduce to proper dimensions, and with a skillful hand to mold his materials into the form of pleasing yet faithful narration; that of the primitive historian was rather to transcribe what was most important from the existing documents of the day. [...] He [Eusebius] was at least faithful to his purpose by culling, [...], the appropriate extracts from ancient writers.
-- C. F. Cruse in his 1850 "Preface by the Translator" in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History reprinted in 1998 by Hendrickson Publishers, Inc.

[NOTE: It is extremely important that period writings are examined in the context of their period and also of their author as a man or woman from that same period. To impose modern notions of the discipline of scientific history (as Cruse calls it) on ancient historians is to decide a priori to misunderstand the writing.]

Let it be noted, too, that if the object of justifying faith is the entire Scriptures, there can be no assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Again and again doubt will rise in one’s mind, and indeed in the mind of the most learned theologian, as to whether his understanding of all Scripture, including the historical portions of it, is the correct one. The inevitable product of Bellarmine’s contention, as indeed of the whole Roman Catholic system, is the monstrum incertitudinis [monstrous uncertainty]. A person may have the fides iustificans [faith that justifies] and salvans [saves] though he is ignorant of certain parts of Scripture and even in weakness errs in certain doctrines of Scripture. The Bible teaches this explicitly (Rom. 14:1 ff.). Orthodoxy and true faith are not identical. Genuine orthodoxy is in every case the result of saving faith (for only in those hearts which accept the Gospel the Holy Ghost is active), but there are cases where saving faith has not as yet produced the acceptance of all doctrines of Scripture. This truth has been unhesitatingly professed by Luther, the Lutheran Confessions, and the Lutheran dogmaticians, though, at the same time, they unhesitatingly have refused to concede to any man the right to surrender any portion of the Christian doctrine.
-- Pieper, Francis. Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II. Saint Louis (Concordia Publishing House): 1953. (424-425)

Luther: "We have the promise and hope of heaven, and the recompense and reward of our present misery will be so great that we shall rebuke ourselves severely for ever having dropped one tear or sigh on account of this contempt and ingratitude of the world. Why, we shall say, did we not suffer even worse things? I never would have believed that there could be such surpassing glory in eternal life; else I should not have so dreaded to suffer even much worse things." (St. L. II: 1237; Erl., Exeg. Opp. Lat. 9, 235.)
-- Pieper, Francis. Christian Dogmatics, Vol. III. Saint Louis (Concordia Publishing House): 1953.