the grossest absurdities.
They wrote as though they had been eye witnesses of every occurrence.
They told all the past, they predicted all the future, with an
impudence that amounted to sublimity. They said that the Tartars
originally came from hell, and that they were called Tartars because
that was one of the names of hell. These gentlemen accounted for the
red on the breasts of robins from the fact that those birds used to
carry water to the unhappy infants in hell. Other eminent historians
say that Nero was in the habit of vomiting frogs. When I read that, I
said some of the croakers of the present day would be better for such a
vomit. Others say that the walls of a city fell down in answer to
prayer. They tell us that King Arthur was not born like other mortals;
that he had great luck in killing giants; that one of the giants that
he killed wore clothes woven from the beards of kings that he had
slain, and, to cap the climax, the authors of this history were
rewarded for having written the only reliable history of their country.
These are the men from whom we get our creeds and our confessions of
faith.

In all the histories of those days there is hardly a truth. Facts were
not considered of any importance. They wrote, and the people believed
that the tracks of Pharaoh's chariot were still visible upon the sands
of the Red Sea, and that they had been miraculously preserved as
perpetual witnesses of the miracles that had been performed, and they
said to any man who denied it, "Go there and you will find the tracks
still upon the sand." They accounted for everything as the work of
good and evil spirits; with cause and effect they had nothing to do.
Facts were in no way related to each other. God, governed by infinite
caprice, filled the world with miracles and disconnected events, and
from his quiver came the arrows of pestilence and death. The moment
the idea is abandoned that everything in this universe is natural--that
all phenomena are the necessary links in the endless chain of
being--the conception of history becomes impossible that the ghost of
the present is not the child of the past; the present is not the mother
of the future. In the domain of superstition all is accident and
caprice; and do not, I pray you, forget that the writers of our creeds
and confessions of faith believed this to be a world of chance.
Nothing happens by accident; nothing happens by chance. In the wide
universe everything