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158 I am able to judge, there has been a good deal of work expended upon them. I should say that some of them are as wonderfully got up as I am; and on some of them you appear to have taken far more pains than you have taken on me. Adam named all the beasts. What did he name that brute near the centre? Perhaps these creatures were the handiwork of Melchisedek. He, like you, had no "beginning of days;" and, sitting through the silence and loneliness of the eternity that elapsed before the creation of the world, he may have amused himself by "creating" that which now amazes me, and which possibly, O Lord, amazes you.

O Lord, while I am on the subject of creation, may I be pardoned for drawing your attention to the fact that you not only "created" animalcule of which you were ignorant, but boundless and numerous worlds of which you knew nothing. You have turned out to be a far, far cleverer God than you thought you were. You "created" the Earth on the first day; while, on the third day, you, apparently as the result of an after-thought, "created" the Sun, Moon, and Stars, just as a sort of lamps to give light to the Earth. You seem to have had no idea that you had "created" the lamps vastly bigger and grander than the object they were "created" to light. Just read the following few lines, O Lord, and you will see what I mean:—

This earth is nearly eight thousand miles in diameter. You, when you wrote your Book, supposed the earth to have been flat and immovable, resting on four corners. The Christian theologians believed that theory down to the day when Galileo and Bruno declared the world was round, and moved, and Bruno was put to death. They continued in that belief even down to the day of Columbus, whom they caused to be imprisoned as a heretic for espousing the Copernican system that the world moved, thereby contradicting the Bible. The sun, the centre of our planetary system, and which is represented to have been made after our earth to give light to it, is nearly ninety-five millions of miles from us. Its magnitude is one million four hundred thousand times greater than that of the earth.

More than ninety members of the group of asteroids,