on saw God dividing light from
the darkness. I am sure the man who wrote it, believed darkness to be
an entity, a something, a tangible thing that can be mixed with light.

The next thing that he informs us is that God divided the waters above
the firmament from those below the firmament. The man who wrote that
believed the firmament to be a solid affair. And that is what the gods
did. You recollect the gods came down and made love to the daughters
of men--and I never blamed them for it. I have never read a
description of any heaven I would not leave on the same errand. That
is where the gods lived. There is where they kept the water. It was
solid. That is the reason the people prayed for rain. They believed
that an angel could take a lever, raise a window and let out the
desired quantity. I find in the Psalms that "He bowed the heavens and
came down;" and we read that the children of men built a tower to
reach the heavens and climb into the abode of the gods. The man who
wrote that believed the firmament to be solid. He knew nothing about
the laws of evaporation. He did not know that the sun wooed with
amorous kiss the waves of the sea, and that, disappointed, their
vaporous sighs changed to tears and fell again as rain. The next thing
he tells us is that the grass began to grow; and the branches of the
trees laughed into blossom, and the grass ran up the shoulder of the
hills, and yet not a solitary ray of light had left the eternal quiver
of the sun. Not a blade of grass had ever been touched by a gleam of
light. And I do not think that grass will grow to hurt without a gleam
of sunshine. I think the man who wrote that simply made a mistake, and
is excusable to a certain degree. The next day he made the sun and
moon--the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night. Do you
think the man who wrote that knew anything about the size of the sun?
I think he thought it was about three feet in diameter, because I find
in some book that the sun was stopped a whole day, to give a general
named Joshua time to kill a few more Amalekites; and the moon was
stopped also. Now it seems to me that the sun would give light enough
without stopping the moon; but as they were in the stopping business
they did it just for devilment. At another time, we read, the sun was
turned ten degrees backward to convince Hezekiah that he was not going
to die of a boil. How much easier it would have been to cure the boil.
T