Two Great Lights

which were made to rule the day and the night. His words in this place cannot be harmonised with the context of the passage he refers to. He acknowledges that the first verse refers to the creation of the universe. Let me ask, could the universe possibly be completed without the sun and moon? Could the solar system be created without its centre? Does not the second day's work further refer to the existence of light, and does our lecturer not so acknowledge? Is not the sun our source of light? and does not the record declare that evening and morning were during the second period? Then why does Ingersoll attempt to make the words—"and he made the sun and the moon—the sun to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night," to mean that the sun and moon were not created until the fourth period? He should be just in this matter as he probably would be in fulfilling a mercantile or official engagement. Truth and candour are the only things which fit facts. They are never out of joint with the harmony of the universe. He should have referred, if his intentions were honourable, to the complete paragraph from which he made this partial extract, and have shown that "God said let there be lights in the firmament,"—bodies of light, or light-giving orbs in the expanse of heaven,—"to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years . . . and it was so." Then succeeds, naturally, the narrator's description of these two great lights, one of which was made to rule the day, and the other was made to rule the night, It neither states nor implies that these orbs were not till then called into existence and placed in their positions in the universe, but simply that to them were delegated the offices mentioned, which they have faithfully performed until this day in strict obedience to the Divine command.

I imagine he thought that by this misrepresentation he would be able to call forth some derision upon the cosmic record of Moses. But nature would falsify herself if she did not cause the ridicule to recoil upon the head of the guilty fabricator! How did he come to forget that "a lie will not fit anything" in the catalogue of facts? Had he been a careful student of the Mosaic records, and a faithful—by that I mean not an untruthful—expounder of the facts of creation, he would have been less foolish than to attempt to ridicule the former by the latter, for it is impossible to discover a want of harmony between them.

The carelessness of his method of examining the Bible is plainly evinced by such expressions as—"Because I find in