B UT let us read the first verse of the first chapter:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Indeed! The text could not be more childish if it read: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the moon." Is not the moon, or the earth, a very small part of "the heaven" and included therein? Why separate the earth, or the moon, from the rest of the universe? How would it sound to say: "In the beginning God created the earth and the Sandwich Islands?" or "the earth and a grain of sand"? But our next comment will show that if the writer of this first verse of the first chapter of the bible was pitiably ignorant of his subject, the translator of it was even worse than ignorant—he was, I am sorry to say, also a falsifier.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

I hold my breath! The very first verse shows deliberate manipulation and tampering with the text. The Hebrew word which has been rendered into English as "God," is "Elohim," which means gods, not God. The singular of Elohim is Eloah—the dreaded one. But the Hebrew text reads Elohim, not Eloah, that is to say, the plural and not the singular form is used. Had the translators of the bible been free from sectarian prejudices, the first verse in the bible would have read: "In beginning (not in the beginning) the gods created the heaven and the earth." But the priesthood, which had the bible in its custody, desired to prove by it the dogma of monotheism. Yet, the first verse of the first chapter of the bible proved polytheism—more than one god. Whereupon, the translators quietly dropped the letter "s" from the word gods, and made it to read God, thereby suppressing the fact that the supposed inspired writer of the opening chapter of the book was a Pagan, with more gods than the translators themselves believed in. It does not require much effort to see what the consequences would have been had the first verse of the bible been truthfully rendered into the modern tongues. "In beginning the gods created the heaven and the earth" might have relegated the bible to the limbo of other mythological compositions. "The gods" would have made the exclusiveness of Christianity or Judaism impossible. The history of European religions would have been different had not that one letter "s" in the first verse of the first chapter of the bible, and the very first time the deity is mentioned, been killed by the translators. Of course, finding manipulation in the very first verse, we will begin to suspect that other texts, too, have been "doctored."

The very name of the book—Holy Bible—shows manipulation. By what, or by whose authority is the book called "holy"? It is nowhere stated in any of the manuscripts translated that the writings are "holy." The words Holy Bible, then, represent nothing more than the opinion or guess, or, at best, the judgment, of the English translators of the book.

But there is a more serious example of manipulation on the title-page of the Bible. Instead of admitting that the translation has been made from Hebrew and Greek copies, not originals, for there are no originals (and, therefore, there is no way of telling how true the copies are, since they can not be compared with the originals), the words Translated out of the original Greek is inserted on the title-page of the New Testament. This, I am compelled to say, is an indefensible misstatement. The truth is that the originals, if they ever existed, are lost. The bible as we have it is not quite two hundred and fifty years old, and the most ancient manuscript in existence of the Old Testament is not a thousand years old. This is the Codex Petropolitanus, which is in the library of St. Petersburg. But where are the originals? Why were they lost? Why were they "inspired" if they were not to be preserved? But how can men who do not hesitate to state in print that they possess the "original Greek" of the New Testament when they do not and never have possessed it, pose as the moral teachers of the world? If the translators of the bible wished to confine themselves to the truth, instead of saying "Translated out of the original Greek, which is not so, they would have said this on the title-page of their work:

A Collection of Writings

Of Unknown Date and Authorship,

Rendered Into English

From Supposed Copies of Supposed Originals

Unfortunately Lost.

Rev. T. K. Cheyne, who is one of the contributors to the most scholarly work recently produced by churchmen, * gives a number of instances of deliberate manipulation of bible texts by the translators. "The Old Testament," he writes, "is not altogether in its original form; it has undergone not merely corruption, but editorial manipulation. This is plainer in some books than in others; but nowhere, perhaps, is it more manifest than in the Psalter." Two of his examples of mistranslation are from the twenty-ninth psalm:

Compare also the first verse of the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm with its literal translation as given by Doctor Cheyne :

But one of the worst cases of tampering with "inspired" texts is to be found in the New Testament. For nearly two thousand years the seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the first epistle of St. John has been saying this: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one."

You may look high and low for that text in the Revised Version, but you will not be able to find it there. That text has slipped out of, or has been spirited away from, the bible, revised. After twenty centuries of time, the forgery blushes to look criticism in the face. The smuggled text for the trinity is still in the King James' bible, but the best scholarship of the church, at least, is ashamed of it, and has dropped it. What confidence can be placed upon men who wait for twenty hundred years before they will admit that what the Rationalist has been saying right along about the bible being a medley (to which from time to time the sects made such additions as suited their interests or from which they dropped whatever was prejudicial to their claims) is really true.

But let us return to the first verse of the bible: It is evident that the writer of that verse believed in more than one god. This is shown by other references to the subject in the same chapter. He makes Elohim, or the gods, say, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Still another text reads: "Behold the man has become as one of us," which is also in keeping with the "gods" who created the heaven and the earth.

In reply to this criticism, it has been argued that the "we" or the "us" and the "our" in this part of the bible prove the doctrine of the trinity. The Catholic bible, in a footnote, plainly says so. Evidently, John Milton was of the same opinion, for in Paradise Lost he says:

... Therefore the omnipotent

Eternal father—thus to his Son audibly spake:

Let us make now man in our image... *

But why should the words "us" and "our" prove that there are only three persons in the Godhead? Why may not "we" mean four, or forty? Why only three? It is really childish to see in "gods," or in "we," a proof of only three gods, and no more.

Besides, the members of the trinity are all supposed to belong to the male sex; but the "gods" in Genesis say that they created man in their image, "male and female," the implication being that there were female as well as male gods in the "we" of the first chapter of the bible. This argument failing, the defenders of the bible make a second attempt to explain away the letter "s" in gods: The writer of the first chapter of the bible, they argue, wrote the plural form out of respect to the deity. He used the "royal style" of speaking to express his veneration. But if "gods" in the plural is the respectful title of the deity, why did the translators use the disrespectful singular in English? Why did they drop the plural for the singular in the translation? Or is it only in Hebrew that the "royal style" must be observed? And is it conceivable that a God who elsewhere in the bible says "I"—"I am a jealous God," and "I only am God," and "there is none other beside me"—would here, and in the very first chapter, and on a most important subject, say "we gods" created "the heaven and the earth"?

There is no better way to prove the weakness of a cause than by trying to uphold it by equivocal arguments. Men would never be arguing that "we" means the trinity, or that it is the "royal style," etc., if they had more cogent arguments to advance. It is only when we are hard pressed that we resort to sophistry.

But let us read the second verse:

The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Honestly, it is impossible to get any intelligible meaning out of such a sentence. The earth was without form? Was not the form of our globe the same in the beginning as it is now? Can there be anything without a form of some kind? The revisers of the authorized version of the bible, wishing to remedy this ignorant statement, have dropped the word form, and substituted in its place the word waste: "The earth was waste and void." But "waste" and "void" mean practically the same thing. The revisers have simply refused to translate the word which means "without form." Of course, the revised version is not read in all the churches; and in the authorized version, "the earth is without form." This meaningless text has been made to support the idea that at one time there was only chaos, out of which the creator evolved cosmos. Science, however, has shown that nature was never in a state of chaos. The laws of matter are the same to-day, and will be the same to-morrow—and they have never been different. The law of gravitation, for instance, was as potent and inevitable when the earth was younger as it is now. There was just as much order, or to put it differently, nature was as orderly a billion years ago as she is to-day. Everything happened according to the inherent properties of matter and force then, as now, and as it will happen to-morrow and forever. Chaos, then, is a figment of the theological mind. To provide God with something to do, a chaos was invented, which had to be tamed into a cosmos to keep the deity occupied.

But the text proceeds to inform us that "darkness was upon the face of the deep." This can not mean that the land itself was in the light; it must mean that the entire earth, land and sea, were wrapped up in darkness. All we have, then, in the beginning, is darkness, and God's spirit moving about in the darkness. What a beginning! If God is light, as we are told elsewhere in the bible, how could there be darkness where he lived and moved about? God in the dark! or, God and the darkness! The unknown! It is this Darkness which men have called God! And is it not significant that because of this early association with darkness, the gods have always preferred it to the light. In First Kings, sixth chapter, fourth verse, we read that Solomon in building his temple "made windows of narrow lights." The house was meant to be the dwelling place of God, and care was taken to shut out the light, except what slipped in through narrow windows. Modern church buildings show the same prejudice against the light. God feels at home in the darkness! That was his first home—when he moved about in the universal night. It is also plainly stated in the bible that God prefers darkness for his abode.

The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness. *

God! Darkness! They are joined together and no man has ever been able to put them asunder.

But let us read on:

And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

Was that the first time the deity saw the light? Did he not know before this that the light was good? If he really had been moving over the face of the waters in total darkness for oons, who could blame him for calling the light good? After he saw that the light was good, he divided it from the darkness, and he called the light day, and the darkness he called night, "and the evening and the morning were the first day." We have now day and night—evening and morning; but we have as yet no sun. Indeed, the sun is not created until the fourth day. How could there be light without the sun? And why create a sun if light could be had without it? The earth is in darkness or in the light according to its relative position to the sun. By its revolution on its axis the earth presents an ever shifting surface to the sun. The earth's movements are caused by two contrary forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal—the one tossing the earth like a ball into infinite space, and the other tugging it toward the sun. The equilibrium of these forces marks the diurnal course of the earth. Without the sun there would be no revolution of the earth, and if the earth stood still, there could be neither evening nor morning. And yet this verse states there was day and night, morning and evening, before there was any sun. The idea that the world is a progressive body, with the reins in the grip of those two forces, the centrifugal and the centripetal, whipping her on, and yet never letting her for a moment, even, to step out of the celestial race-course, never entered the puny and prosaic minds of myth-makers. Is there any reason why we should accept so impossible an explanation of the origin of the universe, or of the relation of the earth to the sun, when we have within our reach the stupendous revelations of science?

The creation of the sun, like the creation of the woman, seems to have been an afterthought. Not only was there both light and darkness—a day and a night—before there was any sun, but the sunless light was also strong enough to produce vegetation, for the bible states that herbs and trees appeared and flourished on the third day; that is to say, vegetation arrived twenty-four hours before the sun. Not only does the bible speak of the stars as if they were thrown in, "He made the stars also," but the sun seems to have been thrown in, too—just as a grocer weighing beans tosses into the already loaded scales a few additional ones.

"The sun was made to give light upon the earth," say the Scriptures. But the earth was already lit up by the "Let there be light, and there was light," of the deity. The grass grew and the trees bore fruit after their kind without any help whatever from the sun. But an excuse must be provided for the existence of the sun: it was made "to give light upon the earth." It never occurred to the infallible writer that the sun, being one million five hundred thousand times bigger than the earth, would give more light than the earth could use. What would we say to the wisdom of creating a million million candle-power electric flame to light a molecule of dust? Yet, not only the sun which is fifteen hundred thousand times bigger than ourselves, but also the stars which are many times bigger than the sun, and of which there are an infinite number, were all created to dance attendance on this tiny dewdrop of a world, trembling in infinite space. The man who originated this gossip about sun and stars thought the firmament was a solid roof, just about so large and so far from the earth. It was made of hammered plate, and was equipped with windows which opened and shut, to let out or to stop the rain. The stars, sun and moon were fastened to this upper roof and worked to and fro "like sliding panels." Is it possible that people find this infantile story of earth and sky inspiring? And is it not a pity that we Americans, in this twentieth century, lack both the courage and the frankness to speak our minds freely on the bible? If this Asiatic book has done no other harm than to seal the lips of science from fear, it has done enough to deserve all the criticisms that Rationalism has leveled against it.