“Then don’t you believe it, Spenser. Poetical the story may be, with apparent slight contradictions in places, which are mostly different writers’ ideas of things, but the broad teaching and general truths are actually proved by scientific fact to be founded on a rock, and impregnable. Science confirms the truth of the Bible, and in like manner the Bible proves scientific facts to be facts.” “But take the story of creation, for instance,” persisted Godfrey; “science cannot surely support the Bible-sequence of the events in the creation.” “Why not? To me it does.” “Because if the story is to be believed, the earth had light and darkness, day and night, long before the sun and moon were created, and yet we depend on both for light.” “Certainly, but what about the luminiferous ether, which can both convey and absorb healthy light, the _ignis fatuus_, and other well-known chemical phenomena which could give a form of light (though not healthy to us, but man was not then created), for ages before the formation of the sun, and the sun was certainly created long after our Earth because it is younger, being yet in its infancy, notwithstanding the old belief which is held even now by many eminent scientists, that the sun is the parent of the whole of the solar system. Besides, Spenser, if you give this matter but a moment’s thought, you will see how untenable is the argument that light emanates _only_ from the sun, for there are seen certain stars which are not suns and, so far as we can see, these have no ruling suns; if they had, our lenses would show them; but granted they have, the suns, to be out of reach of our glasses, must be so far away that their light could not reach these particular stars visible to us, which ought, therefore, to be dark and invisible. And if it had reached them and illumined them, the chances are the time is so long past that these suns do not now exist, and we see but the light of a bygone time, which no doubt in many instances is the case.