The incredible stories found in the Bible, the fabulous inventions concocted in the imagination of some person or persons away in Chaldea many thousand years ago, are still taught to be true, and the children in the Sunday-schools are instructed to believe these absurdities. The undue haste exhibited in the first chapter of Genesis, in creating the earth, etc., is one of those wonderful puzzles to a child's mind. It is a something that is not easily explained at length to young people without awaking the suspicion of its impossibility, and requires considerable ingenuity to satisfy inquiring minds concerning it. The supernaturalists get over it by a final and complete answer, that admits of no argument--that "With God everything is possible." That being absolutely untrue, the answer explains nothing, but has a tendency to stupefy the child and hinder its educational advancement, for the reason that such an answer puts a stop to all farther inquiry. This really has been the effect of this pernicious teaching for many centuries. All the stories, fables, myths, handed down to us from antiquity may be classed in the same category. There are many of them--yes, a perfect wilderness. All are true in part, but false as a whole. Upon close examination we find glimmerings of truth in all of them. The difference lies in the kind, not in the quality. In the biblical story of creation, the writers had evidently observed, and knew, there were an earth, water, stars, and something above the earth which they called heaven, the atmosphere. That was the limit of their knowledge. They knew they existed, and things and objects that surrounded them existed, and they made an attempt in their primitive method to account for the manner in which these things came into existence. They could know nothing about it, because the most important discoveries were made thousands of years later. Hesiod, 900 B.C., in his "Theogonia," invokes the Muses who inhabit the heavenly mansions, and whose knowledge of generation and birth he had formerly sung: "Tell, ye celestial powers, how first the gods and world were made; the rivers, and the boundless sea, with its strong surge. Also, the bright, shining stars, and wide-stretched heaven above, and all the gods that sprang from them, givers of good things." The Muses answer: "First of all existed chaos; next in order the broad-bosomed Earth; then Love appeared, the most beautiful of immortals. From chaos sprang Erebus and dusky night, and from night and Erebus came Ether and smiling day." He gives a further description, which, like the foregoing, we know to be fiction, yet to contain elements of truth. We are not asked to believe all. He says: "Look up, and view the immense expanse of heaven, The boundless Ether in his genial arms Clasping the earth. Him callest thou God and Jove."