1. In every child's life there comes a moment when it ceases to take the world and all it holds as a matter of course, when it begins to wonder and to question. The first, the great question naturally is--"Who made it all? The sun, the stars, the sea, the rivers, the flowers, and the trees--whence come they? who made them?" And to this question we are very ready with our answer:--"God made it all. The One, the Almighty God created the world, and all that is in it, by His own sovereign will." When the child further asks: "_How_ did He do it?" we read to it the story of the Creation which is the beginning of the Bible, our Sacred Book, either without any remarks upon it, or with the warning, that, for a full and proper understanding of it, years are needed and knowledge of many kinds. Now, these same questions have been asked, by children and men, in all ages. Ever since man has existed upon the earth, ever since he began, in the intervals of rest, in the hard labor and struggle for life and limb, for food and warmth, to raise his head and look abroad, and take in the wonders that surrounded him, he has thus pondered and questioned. And to this questioning, each nation, after its own lights, has framed very much the same answer; the same in substance and spirit (because the only possible one), acknowledging the agency of a Divine Power, in filling the world with life, and ordaining the laws of nature,--but often very different in form, since, almost every creed having stopped short of the higher religious conception, that of One Deity, indivisible and all-powerful, the great act was attributed to many gods--"the gods,"--not to God. This of course opened the way to innumerable, more or less ingenious, fancies and vagaries as to the part played in it by this or that particular divinity. Thus all races, nations, even tribes have worked out for themselves their own COSMOGONY, i.e., their own ideas on the Origin of the World. The greatest number, not having reached a very high stage of culture or attained literary skill, preserved the teachings of their priests in their memory, and transmitted them orally from father to son; such is the case even now with many more peoples than we think of--with all the native tribes of Africa, the islanders of Australia and the Pacific, and several others. But the nations who advanced intellectually to the front of mankind and influenced the long series of coming races by their thoughts and teachings, recorded in books the conclusions they had arrived at on the great questions which have always stirred the heart and mind of man; these were carefully preserved and recopied from time to time, for the instruction of each rising generation. Thus many great nations of olden times have possessed Sacred Books, which, having been written in remote antiquity by their best and wisest men, were reverenced as something not only holy, but, beyond the unassisted powers of the human intellect,