you to such belief.

lighted by the sun

sky, because your

Neither could you

they appear, and we still talk of the sun rising and setting, although we are sure he does nothing of the kind If you had not learnt anything from books and other helps about the roundness of the earth and its movements in space, and had been shut up all your life in some wide plain where no hills broke the long, low line around, and gave you a sight, let us say, of the sea hiding in the distance the hulls of ships, you would have believed the earth to be flat and fixed, and travelling daily across the senses led have learnt anything of the vastness and distance of the sun and stars, and you might have made the most simple guesses about these matters, as did some of the wise Greeks. One of them said that the moon was as large as that part of Greece once known as the Peloponnesus, but now called the Morea, and was laughed at for his boldness; while another held that the pale belt of light which is named, from a pretty myth, the Milky Way, and which we know consists of millions of stars, of which our sun is one, was the place where the two halves of the sky are joined

together. And it was a very long time before people would believe that there were millions of mankind who were walking with their feet opposite to ours on another part of the earth.

But as the mind of man searched deeper into things many of them were found to be other than they seemed, and thus all truer knowledge as to what they are has been gained by slow and sure correction of that which the senses first told about them. It would fill a bigger book than this to tell through what paths of darkness and danger the master-spirits of old cut their way to light, amidst what silence and fear they worked, and with what trembling they told their discoveries to a trusted few, but the story is one you will do well to study. And now let us look at a few of the old legends about the beginning of things. They are for the most part but little known, and although the forms in which some of them are cast are crude and foolish, they are worth more than a smile. They were very real to those who framed them, and the wise will gladly find in them this truth: that in the presence of the great fact of earth, sea and sky, man has seen a greater

fact than they, even a Cause without whom they had never been, a Cause to whom he has given many a different name and paid worship in many a strange fashion.

The spirit in which these early guesses at truth should be read is well enforced in this story, which comes from an ancient book added to one of the Vedas or sacred books of the Hindus.

A father tells his vain-minded son, in whom no sense of wonder dwells, to bring him a fruit of the huge banyan-tree or Indian fig-tree. Break it,' said the father; 'what do you see?' Some very small seeds,' replied the son. 'Break one of them; what do you see in it?' asked the father. Nothing, my father,' answered the son. 'My child,' said the father, where you see nothing there dwells a mighty banyan-tree.'

By way of comparing them with the stories which follow, it may be well to set down in simple outline the two accounts of the Creation which are given in the Book of Genesis.

In the first account, which is contained in chap. i. 1, to chap. ii. 3, we are told: In the

beginning God created the heaven and the earth.'

On the first day light was created and divided from the darkness, thus causing day and night.

On the second day an expanse was formed above the earth, dividing the waters upon the earth from those which were to be stored as rain. (As Genesis vii. 11 shows, this expanse or dome was believed to be full of windows, which were opened whenever it was needful to let the rain through. The notion that the sky is a great roof covering in a flat world is an idea easily framed by the unlearned; the Polynesians, for example, call foreigners' heaven-bursters,' as having broken in from another world outside.)

On the third day the remainder of the waters were gathered together as seas, and the land was made to bring forth grass and herb and tree.

On the fourth day God made two great lights, the sun and moon: 'He made the stars also.'

On the fifth day He peopled the waters with fishes and the dome above with birds.

On the sixth day the work of creation was ended by the earth bringing forth four-footed

beasts and creeping things; man and woman; as the last and chiefest, being made in the image of God,' Who looked upon all that He had made, saw that it was good, and on the seventh day rested from His work.

The second account, which is given in Genesis ii. 4 to the end, speaks of the earth as without water and plants and trees, because there was no rain and not a man to till the ground.

Then the earth was watered by a mist, and man was made of the dust of the ground by the Lord God, Who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life so that he became a living soul.'

Man was then placed in the garden of Eden with leave to eat of the fruit of every tree except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Then beasts and birds were made and brought to Adam that he might give them names. Last of all, the Lord God made a woman from a rib taken from Adam's side while he slept.

At this point you may ask, How are we to read these and other Bible stories? What they tell us about the creation, the early state of man, the