According to the first narrative, god (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth and all they contain in six ordinary days, and rested from his work on the seventh day. It has been asserted by some zealous but not over scrupulous Christians that days of twenty four hours’ duration were not meant by the writer, but that the word יום (day) signifies an enormous lapse of time; but it is quite clear to anyone with average intelligence that an ordinary day was meant, or else there would have been no use in saying that the evening and the morning were the first day. Moreover, we are distinctly told in Exodus XX. 10, 11, that we are to keep the seventh day as a holiday, “for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day.” We therefore have here the creation of the world, with day and night, but no sun, in one day, which we must admit at once is an absurdity, for it is beyond all doubt scientifically proved that this world could never have existed for one moment without the sun round which it revolves, and our common sense tells us plainly that without a sun there could never have been days and nights, or evenings and mornings. On the second day we are told that god created the firmament, and called it heaven, and that this firmament separated the waters above from those below, which clearly proves that the writer had no other conception of the universe than that it was limited above to the height of the clouds, and bounded below by the earth itself. The third day was set apart for the gathering together of the waters into seas and rivers, and for the creation of the vegetable kingdom, which again is contradictory of all known scientific facts, for there was still no sun in existence. At last, on the fourth day, the sun was created, as also the moon and stars, all being placed in the firmament, between the clouds and the earth, for the sole purpose of acting as lamps and marking time for this world. The writer evidently imagined that the only object of the heavenly orbs is to light up this world, to divide our day from our night, and to limit our seasons, being, apparently, ignorant of the fact that our days and seasons are regulated by the motions of the earth itself, quite irrespective of the movements of the celestial bodies. He was also clearly under the impression that the sun was, after our earth, the largest body in the universe, the moon being next, and the stars the smallest; whereas the sun is five hundred times larger than the earth and all the planets and their moons put together; while the earth is about forty nine times larger in bulk than the moon; and some of the stars are immensely larger than our sun, and all of them, moreover, suns themselves.