The custom of six days’ labor and one day’s rest is a human invention, and is based on the principles of economy, power-saving, labor-saving, and had been a recognized institution long before the date of the supposed creation. For if the statement of Baily be true (and we have no right to discredit it), human beings have existed, in one state or another, above 4,000,000 years. The record of the Hebrew race is insignificant in comparison.

The modern eight-hour movement is the outcome of the economic reforms of labor. Had the composers of the scripture known something of it at that time God might have worked only eight hours instead of from sunrise to sunset.

We cannot have the slightest doubt that the above first-given labor regulation existed long, long ago. The Chaldeans had their mode of government, their laws, their social rules and regulations; other neighboring nations had theirs; it was therefore nothing new. This six days’ labor clause was incorporated, but there was no need of a God to make it.

Verse 4: “And these are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.” What generations of heaven?

Verse 7: “And the Lord God [In this chapter an extra title is assigned to God—it is the Lord God! Why?] formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

This is a very grave error. Man is not made of dust of the ground. There is comparatively very little dust in his composition.

(1) Man contains no more dust than any other animal; the proportion of inorganic constituents in him and other animals is about the same.

(2) Animals are constructed anatomically and physiologically the same. They have the same organs, the same number of muscles, and same number of bones, with some few exceptions. They are built on the same general principles as man; or rather, as man came later, we will say that man is constructed on the same general principles as the animals.

(3) The same mechanism and functions are to be found in the one as in the other—respiration, circulation, digestion, etc.

(4) The proportion of mineral matters contained in a man—or dust, as it is termed in scripture—is about 1/23? to 1/24? of the bodily weight. That is, a body weighing about 125 to 130 pounds would yield about 4½ to 5 pounds of dust, or rather ashes, and the largest proportion of these ashes comes from the solid framework, the skeleton, the bones, composed of phosphates and carbonate of lime.

(5) More than two-thirds of the body’s weight is water—that is, hydrogen and oxygen. The principal elements found in the body are oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon. There are traces of sulphur, etc., besides the mineral substances above alluded to. Thus man is not made of dust, but of water, oxygen and hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. If they had made God say that he made man out of water, he would have been much nearer the truth. Solomon repeats the same in his Eccles. iii, 20: “All go unto one place; all are of dust, and all turn to dust again.” In the burial service the same absurdity is repeated. Alter your service, your prayer—put water in place of dust. Or better, give all the four elements a chance.

Do not teach children we are made out of dust. It is not true. Teach the young what is true. What is the good of lying because some man said, God said so?

The “breath of life.” Is it not time that men of intelligence, in this age of progress and civilization we boast so much of, cease to pretend to believe such nonsense? It is absurd to talk of its being “parables” and “figures of speech.” Either the text means what it says, or it means nothing.

There has been an immense amount of controversy over two Hebrew words, viz.: nephesh—breath, respiring, life, life strength, animal soul; ruach—anamos, breath, wind, psyche, soul, spirit, etc. They thought that the life is in the blood. Lev. xvii, 11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Gen. ix, 4, 5: “But the flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof,” etc., etc. This controversy has given rise to no end of studies, as psychology—derived from the word psyche,—soul. The literature that has been expended on this subject, psyche, soul, cannot be easily estimated. The matter has been twisted into a science, discussed, argued, lectured on, etc. On the word Theo, Theon—Deos—God, societies and sects, etc., have been formed, as the Theosophists.

What is the breath of life that caused so much controversy, in church and out of church? Oxygen. Deprive a man of oxygen and he dies. Deprive a beast of oxygen and it dies. Oxygen thus is essential to life. Neither man nor beast, as we said, can live without it. The issues which this has given rise to are bewildering—theological, metaphysical, Theosophical, philosophical, Agnostic, gnostic, spiritual, etc., etc. Oxygen, however, covers the ground. It represents all, so far as the life of a body is concerned.

We now come to Paradise, or the garden of Eden.

We will try to locate this garden of Eden geographically, as nearly as possible correctly. Verse 8: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward of Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.” That was very kind of God. Verse 9: “God planted the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” A wonderful tree surety. What is most to be regretted is that the species has become extinct. What a boon to humanity if but one tree were planted in every church. Verse 10: “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it parted, and became into four heads.” Verse 11: “The name of the first is Pison; that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.” Verse 12: “And the gold of that land is good; there is bdellium and the onyx stone.” Verse 13: “And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.” Verse 14: “And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.”

Assyria was founded about 2247 B.C. and is situated near the Persian gulf; and seems to be wedged in between the Persian empire on the east, Arabia on the west, or Badien el Arab, and on the southern point the gulf of Persia.

Ethiopia comprises Nubia, Sennaar, and Northern Abyssinia, and takes in a stretch of country on the west shore of the Red sea. The two countries are separated by the Red sea, and by Arabia, which extends from the east shores of the Red sea to the west shores of the Gulf of Persia, and Assyria. Some one made a big blunder, or Johnston’s atlas is wrong, or they—God—made a mistake in the name. There is considerable distance between the two countries. Assyria lies in Asia and Ethiopia in Africa. Egypt lies farthest north of what is usually known as Ethiopia. Assyria is hemmed in, north by Armenia, west by Media and Susiana, south and southeast by Babylon and Mesopotamia. The river Tigris is the dividing line on the south and southeast. The Parachoatras and Zagrus mountains form the dividing line on the western border, and Armenia is the boundary on the north.

Chaldea is, comparatively speaking, a small tract of land situated between the river Euphrates and the Arabian desert, or Badien el Arab, with Babylon on its north and the Gulf of Persia on the southwestern point.

The river Euphrates takes its rise in the Gulf of Persia and runs westward, and divides into four branches.

The first branch, the Pasitigris, runs somewhat westward through Susiana; the second, Chaosper or Kirkhah, runs northward through Susiana; the third, the river Tigris, runs north, northwest, separating Babylon from Susiana by Assyria; the fourth, the river Euphrates, the farthest south, runs westward, etc.

This is the only river near the Gulf of Persia that divides into four branches, and these are the four rivers that are indicated where the garden of Eden was planted. This is near enough geographically to locate this garden which the Lord God planted. It will indeed afford great pleasure for pious people to know whereabouts they can find the garden of Eden. In this rapid-transit age, they can get an excursion ticket and reach this Paradise in a few weeks. This garden was planted in Chaldea.

We will now see what God did next.

Verse 15: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.” God gave the position of gardener to Mr. Adam. The only stipulation in the contract between the Lord God and Adam was (verses 16, 17), he could eat of every tree in the garden except the tree of knowledge. There is a God for you—wants to keep the man he made in his own image, a living soul, as ignorant and as stupid as possible; in addition tempting him to commit a wrong act.

Verse 18: “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.” Very considerate indeed on the part of God.

Verse 21: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh thereof.” This is the cleverest kind of surgical operation that was ever performed, without loss of blood, use of antiseptics or anesthetics, without ligature, etc. And out of this rib he made a woman. Why did God make a man of dust and the woman out of the man’s rib? Why did he breathe into the nostrils of the man and forget to do it to the woman? The only reasonable explanation that can be given is that, in those days, among the Chaldeans, woman was considered an inferior creature, possessing no soul. She was the slave sometimes, but the servant always. She was the creature of man’s lust, of his passion, and she was placed in the Bible by the man that wrote it in just the position and condition she occupied at that period. This is a gross falsehood, it is debasing, it is an infamous libel on truth. Does any woman believe that she is a bone of her husband’s bone, and flesh of his flesh?

Verse 25: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” What is there extraordinary about that? Savage races up to this present time are found in many instances nude. CÆsar describes the Germans as bathing promiscuously in a nude state. Columbus found our American Indians nude. Evidently a degree of civilization had already been attained when this story was evolved. The story had its origin in the romantic regions of Chaldea, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Persian gulf, near the river Euphrates. The singer, the story-teller, or the traveling minstrel tramped from place to place, from one shepherd’s tent to another, relating the story to his crude, barbarous countrymen, reciting the curious yet pretty fable of how man was made; the world made; the garden made; how gold, onyx, and bdellium were found, and where; lauding and glorifying their own country, and making out that they were the immediate descendants of the gods.

Every nation has its fairy tales, its fables, its myths, its songs, and its romances. Whether they have their origin in Egypt, or come down embellished from Mount Olympus, whether they are the fairy tales of the Rhine, or those from the river Euphrates in Chaldea, they are only the products of imagination.

Next we come to chapter iii—the childish account of the serpent, and the woman and the fruit she ate. The serpent is made to say, verse 5: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good from evil.”

The first knowledge they acquired was, that they discovered they were without clothes. “And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” Why sewed? With what? Aprons were a very late invention, and were never intended for any such purpose. And then, the conversation between the Lord God and Adam! God calls for Adam while he is hiding. God inquires with a Chinese simplicity, “Where art thou?” This is the blandest kind of conversation that has ever taken place between mortal man and a God. Adam tells him that he has eaten some fruit. Like the boy who had stolen jam out of the jar, it seems Adam could not lie. God grows petulant, angry, cross; scolds him, and immediately deprives him of his position and turns him out of the garden. God had two reasons for doing what he did. One reason was to punish Adam for disobedience; the second, that God got afraid of Adam.

Verse 22: “And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us” (were there more gods than one?), “to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand; and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—— Was it the fear of competition—that men might interfere with God’s occupation, infringe on his monopoly?

It seems to have a priestly ring, this forbidding and preventing ordinary mortals to become intelligent. The story is so framed as to express the line of conduct of the higher towards the lower, of the slave towards his master, of the laborer towards his lord; and the 19th verse expresses the subjugation of the poor ignorant creature: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” It is the church and the priest that have taken care to keep the dust in the eyes of the masses. They are the cherubim with a flaming sword that keep the masses away from the tree of life.

Chapter iv relates to the crime of murder. God instigates the crime. Abel kept sheep. Cain tilled the ground. Cain brought vegetables to God, and Abel brought the firstlings of his flock and fat. God’s taste ran in the meat line; he was somewhat of an epicurean. He respected Abel and his offering, but did not respect Cain’s. Then God asks Cain why he is cross, and after Cain kills his brother Abel, he, God, says: Where is thy brother Abel? And God dispossesses Cain and drives him east of Eden to Arabia. A very arbitrary landlord this God.

Chapter v: The fourth chapter winds up with Enos the son of Seth. Verse 26: “Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.” Now, Adam lived 930 years, Seth 912 years, and Enos 905 years. God during this period was wholly occupied with these people. Murder is the only incident of importance during the first thousand years. God takes a long rest for nearly 2,000 years before anything of importance occurs.

This chapter treats of the genealogy, age, and death of the patriarchs from Adam to Noah.

The records of creation are by no means harmonious. There are no less than one hundred and twenty opinions on the subject. The difference between the latest and remotest dates is no less than 3,268 years. Here are some of the dates of the supposed creation of the world. They may be interesting to some, as showing the uncertainty and inaccuracy:

Here we give the genealogy of Adam and his line:

We may venture to make a very strong interrogation mark after these years. They are, however, in harmony with the rest of the story. Noah closes the fabulous period. We hear no more of God’s doings until we come to Abraham, 1921 B.C. And Abraham reached the age of 175 years only.

Chapter vi, on the sons of God, etc., is next. I beg to remind the reader we are still in Chaldea, near the Gulf of Persia; near the river Euphrates; near the garden of Eden, where God created man; where we found gold and precious stones; the place where murder was committed; near Arabia, etc. The geographical location is important, and let the reader also remember that the whole tract of land where all these transactions are supposed to have taken place is not so large as any moderate-sized state in our Union.

If you will examine a map of this particular region, it will help to bring the truth to your mind, and add considerably to your understanding. It is also well to bear in mind that in this small territory the art of agriculture was pursued, as well as fruit-growing, sewing was invented and aprons were made, and Eve had an apron before she had a dress, and this high state of civilization existed as soon as man and woman appeared on earth! What a contrast with other barbaric, savage, and uncivilized tribes! Eve had a decided advantage over the young female that was captured when Columbus landed December 12th. She was perfectly naked; so says history.

Verse 2: “The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair; and they took them wives all which they chose.”

Sons of God! Was God married? If so, to whom? How many wives had he? How many sons and daughters? Where was God’s residence, if he had any? Were his domestic relations pleasant or not? Was his family large or small? Pray give us some information. Our theologians will tell us, “Ah, that has a spiritual meaning.”

Verse 3: “And the Lord [not God] said: My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh.” Who?—God? “Yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty.” This is a crafty statement, because it shows that the average length of life was the same as it is now, with some few exceptions, and as the fabulous age was past, the only way to get out of the difficulty was to give timely notice that extraordinary ages should not occur again.

Verse 4: “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Who were these descendants of God that became mighty and men of renown?

After God’s sons intermarry with the daughters of men, the affairs of man grow worse, instead of better. And God grows despondent:

Verse 5: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

Think of God’s sons causing all this wickedness on earth. He ought to have brought them up better. What can we expect of a God that cannot raise his own children properly?

“Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart.” This exhibits the profound ignorance of God. Though he made man, he did not know what the various organs in the body were for. He ought to have known that the heart does not think. Its function is to circulate the blood—a truth which was not discovered until 1618 by Harvey, of England.

Verse 6: “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”

Ha! God has a heart, and he has flesh, and he has sons; he knows what is good, evil, wickedness; repents and grieves; and has domestic relations with—evidently ladies, by whom he has children.

We will not mind the preparations of the ark, or the shipbuilding instructions given by God. A God that knew something of mechanics, shipbuilding, dimensions, measurement, etc.—no wonder theologians call God a designer, an architect. He showed some skill in the construction of this boat.

As soon as Noah had everything prepared, had loaded his cattle, etc., food and provender, God was ready to destroy his own sons and their relations by drowning them.