ook of Genesis--"without form, and void." It was a sunless world in
which land, air, and sea were mixed up together, and over which
reigned a deity called Chaos. With him ruled the goddess of Night and
their son was Erebus, god of Darkness. When the two beautiful children
of Erebus, Light and Day, had flooded formless space with their
radiance, Eros, the god of Love, was born, and Light and Day and Love,
working together, turned discord into harmony and made the earth, the
sea, and the sky into one perfect whole. A giant race, a race of
Titans, in time populated this newly-made earth, and of these one of
the mightiest was Prometheus. To him, and to his brother Epimethus,
was entrusted by Eros the distribution of the gifts of faculties and
of instincts to all the living creatures in the world, and the task of
making a creature lower than the gods, something less great than the
Titans, yet in knowledge and in understanding infinitely higher than
the beasts and birds and fishes. At the hands of the Titan brothers,
birds, beasts, and fishes had fared handsomely. They were Titanic in
their generosity, and so prodigal had they been in their gifts that
when they would fain have carried out the commands of Eros they found
that nothing was left for the equipment of this being, to be called
Man. Yet, nothing daunted, Prometheus took some clay from the ground
at his feet, moistened it with water, and fashioned it into an image,
in form like the gods. Into its nostrils Eros breathed the spirit of
life, Pallas Athene endowed it with a soul, and the first man looked
wonderingly round on the earth that was to be his heritage.
Prometheus, proud of the beautiful thing of his own creation, would
fain have given Man a worthy gift, but no gift remained for him. He
was naked, unprotected, more helpless than any of the beasts of the
field, more to be pitied than any of them in that he had a soul to
suffer.

Surely Zeus, the All Powerful, ruler of Olympus, would have compassion
on Man? But Prometheus looked to Zeus in vain; compassion he had none.
Then, in infinite pity, Prometheus bethought himself of a power
belonging to the gods alone and unshared by any living creature on the
earth.

"We shall give Fire to the Man whom we have made," he said to
Epimethus. To Epimethus this seemed an impossibility, but to
Prometheus nothing was impossible. He bided his time and, unseen by
the gods, he made his way into Olympus, lighted a hollow torch wit