It is as if I had made something beautiful and ingenious for the people of darkest Africa. At first, they would be afraid of it. Not until they were persuaded that it was made in love would they come forward and cautiously lay their hands upon it. Then as their fear subsided and their appreciation increased they would exclaim, "And devils didn't make it, and it won't hurt us, and you made it for our good!" But after their first curiosity had been sufficiently satisfied, I would touch a spring and awaken new wonder by showing the invention to be different from what they had thought, and ten times more wonderful. And thus, at every new revelation of the gift, their mistaken views would be corrected, and their admiration and love for me would be increased. So, in the story of creation, God presented the world to His children by first telling them that devils did not make it, and that vicious gods do not infest it; but that it all proceeded from His will as a loving gift to them. Though they still thought the universe like that which their unaided senses reported to them, yet the thing of supreme importance was that the loving gift came from a good God who rules over all. Than this revelation, nothing could be truer, nor more calculated to put their hearts at rest from fear. It marked a complete transition from a polytheistic and immoral conception of the universe to a theistic and ethical conception. Through all the centuries that have followed, this new revelation of God in His relation to the universe has been arousing the noble ambition and commanding the loving obedience of men. As men have studied their good gift from God, a growing scientific knowledge has enabled them from time to time to unlock the mysteries of nature; and behold, their good gift was not a snug little world floating in a sea, as they had thought, but a magnificent solar system flying through space, and pulsating in an infinite sea of ether; and the supposed firmament was but a light effect on particles of dust in the atmosphere, caused by the light as it makes its journey of ninety-three million miles from the sun. And once more devout men exclaimed with awe, "Is this what the good God made for us by the mere fiat of His will?" That God said, "Let there be light: and there was light," was the affirmation of an inspired man who little realized that light travels the distance of eight times around the earth in one second, and yet requires more than four years at that speed to come from the nearest star. Thus science may forever change our conception of the world, and our sense of the Creator's majesty.