whether healthy or pathological; whereas the savage, it seems, thought only of his crops. Nothing can be more astonishing than this discovery, if it be true, but there are many facts which might lead us to believe that the romance of love inspired early art and religion as well as modern thought.

And again:

Religion is a gorgeous efflorescence of human love. The tender passion has left its footsteps on the sands of time in magnificent monuments and libraries of theology.

This may seem startling to many orthodox readers, but it is no new theory, and is doubtless quite true, for all gods have been made by man, and all theologies have been evolved by man, and the odour and the colour of his human passions cling to them always, even after they are discarded. Under all man's dreams of eternal gods and eternal heavens lies man's passion for the eternal feminine. But on these subjects "Moses" spoke in parables, and I shall not speak at all.

Mr. Robertson, in Christianity and Mythology, says of the Bible:

It is a medley of early metaphysics and early fable-early, that is, relatively to known Hebrew history. It ties together two creation stories and two flood stories; it duplicates several sets of mythic personages-as Cain and Abel, Tubal-Cain and Jabal; it grafts the curse of Cham on the curse of Cain, making that finally the curse of Canaan ; it tells the same offensive story twice of one patriarch, and again of another; it gives an early "metaphysical" theory of the origin of death, life, and evil; it adapts the Egyptian story of the "Two Brothers," or the myth of Adonis, as the history of Joseph; it makes use of various God-names, pretending that they always stood for the same deity; it repeats traditions concerning mythic founders of races-if all this be not "a medley of early fable," what is it?

I quote next from The Bible and the Child, in which Dean Farrar says:

Some of the books of Scripture are separated from others by the interspace of a thousand years. They represent the fragmentary survival of Hebrew literature. They stand on very different levels of value, and even of morality. Read for centuries in an otiose, perfunctory, slavish, and superstitious manner, they have often been so egregiously misunderstood that many entire systems of interpretationwhich were believed in for generations, and which fill many folios, now consigned to a happy oblivion-are clearly proved to have been utterly

baseless.

Colossal usurpations of deadly import to the human race have been built, like inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a single misinterpreted text.

Compare those utterances of the freethinker and the divine, and then read the following words of Dean Farrar :

The manner in which the Higher Criticism has slowly and surely made its victorious progress, in spite of the most determined and exacerbated opposition, is a strong argument in its favour. It is exactly analogous to the way in which the truths of astronomy and of geology have triumphed over universal opposition. They were once anathematised as "infidel"; they are now accepted as axiomatic. I cannot name a single student or professor of any eminence in Great Britain who does not accept, with more or less modification, the main conclusions of the German school of critics.

This being the case, I ask, as a mere layman, what right has the Bible to usurp the title of "the word of God"? What evidence can be sharked up to show that it is any more a holy or an inspired book than any book of Thomas Carlyle's, or John Ruskin's, or William Morris'? What evidence is forthcoming that the Bible is true?

THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO

ANCIENT RELIGION AND

MODERN SCIENCE

THE theory of the early Christian Church was that the Earth was flat, like a plate, and the sky was a solid dome above it, like an inverted blue basin.

The Sun revolved round the Earth to give light by day, the Moon revolved round the Earth to give light by night. The stars were auxiliary lights, and had all been specially, and at the same time, created for the good of man.

God created the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Earth in six days. He created them by word, and He created them out of nothing.

The centre of the Universe was the Earth. The Sun was made to give light to the Earth by day, and the Moon to give light to Earth by night.

Any man who denied that theory in those days was in danger of being murdered as an Infidel.

To-day our ideas are very different. Hardly any educated man or woman in the world believes that the world is flat, or that the Sun revolves round the Earth, or that what we call the sky is a solid substance, like a domed ceiling.

Advanced thinkers, even amongst the Christians, believe that the world is round, that it is one of a series of planets revolving round the Sun, that the Sun is only one of many millions of other suns, that these suns were not created simultaneously, but at different periods, probably separated by millions or billions of years.

We have all, Christians and Infidels alike, been obliged to acknowledge that the Earth is not the centre of the whole Universe, but only a minor planet revolving around and dependent upon, one of myriads of suns.

God, called by Christians "Our Heavenly Father," created all things. He created not only the world, but the whole universe. He is all-wise, He is all-powerful, He is allloving, and He is revealed to us in the Scriptures.

Let us see. Let us try to imagine what kind of a God the creator of this Universe would be, and let us compare him with the God, or Gods, revealed to us in the Bible, and in the teachings of the Church.

We have seen the account of the Universe and its creation, as given in the revealed Scriptures. Let us now take a hasty view of the Universe and its creation as revealed to us by science.

What is the Universe like, as far as our limited knowledge goes?

Our Sun is only one sun amongst many millions. Our planet is only one of eight which revolve around him.

Our Sun, with his planets and comets, comprises what is known as the solar system.

There is no reason to suppose that his is the only Solar System: there may be many millions of solar systems. For aught we know, there may be millions of systems, each containing millions of solar systems.

Let us deal first with the solar system of which we are a part.

His

His

All

The Sun is a globe of 866,200 miles diameter. diameter is more than 108 times that of the Earth. volume is 1,305,000 times the volume of the Earth. the eight planets added together only make one-sevenhundredth part of his weight. His circumference is more than two and a half millions of miles. He revolves upon his axis in 25 days, or at a speed of nearly 4000 miles an hour.

This immense and magnificent globe diffuses heat and light to all the other planets.

Without the light and heat of the Sun no life would now be, or in the past have been, possible on this Earth, or any other planet of the solar system.

The eight planets of the solar system are divided into four inferior and four superior.

The inferior planets are Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and

Mars. The superior are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The diameters of the smaller planets are as follow: Mercury, 3008 miles; Mars, 5000 miles; Venus, 7480 miles; the Earth, 7926 miles.

The diameters of the large planets are: Jupiter, 88,439 miles; Saturn, 75,036 miles; Neptune, 37,205 miles; Uranus, 30,875 miles.

The volume of Jupiter is 1389 times, of Saturn 848 times, of Neptune 103 times, and of Uranus 59 times the volume of the Earth.

The mean distances from the Sun are: Mercury, 36 million miles; Venus, 67 million miles; the Earth, 93 million miles; Mars, 141 million miles; Jupiter, 483 million miles; Saturn, 886 million miles; Uranus, 1782 million miles; Neptune, 2792 million miles.

To give an idea of the meaning of these distances, I may say that a train travelling night and day at 60 miles an hour would take quite 176 years to come from the Sun to the Earth.

The same train, at the same speed, would be 5280 years in travelling from the Sun to Neptune.

Reckoning that Neptune is the outermost planet of the solar system, that system would have a diameter of 5584 millions of miles.

If we made a chart of the solar system on a scale of 1 inch to a million miles, we should need a sheet of paper 465 feet 4 inches wide. On this sheet the Sun would have a diameter of less than I inch, and the Earth would be about the size of a pin-prick.

If an express train, going at 60 miles an hour, had to travel round the Earth's orbit, it would be more than 1000 years on the journey. If the Earth moved no faster, our winter would last more than 250 years. But in the solar system the speeds are as wonderful as the sizes. The Earth turns upon its axis at the rate of 1000 miles an hour, and travels in its orbit round the Sun at the rate of more than 1000 miles a minute, or 66,000 miles an hour.

So much for the size of the solar system. It consists of a Sun and eight planets, and the outer planet's orbit is one