That lesson and the surroundings on that sunny Sabath morning is one of the old landmarks in my memory to which I often return in moments of reflection.
"Now children," he began, "no one knows who wrote the first chapter of Genesis, which appears to have no connection with the other chapters. It may have been written by Moses, his sister, Miriam, or some other person along about that time, say four or five thousand years ago. The strange thing about it is that, according to their new geology, the writer revealed the secrets of that which transpired millions of years ago.
"People had supposed, until about one hundred years ago, that the first chapter of Genesis was a fable, or fairy tale, but now geology proves it to have been a true history of what the writer knew nothing about.
"It must have been that an angel who had lived all through the time the world was being made, sat right beside or in some way influenced the author to write the wonderful story of the creation. This is what I call real inspiration, don't you?
"Some folks think, and I would not wonder if it might be true, that fiction is a faint glimmer of inspiration, and that composers are often led along by the spirit of some person who once lived in this world. Let this be as it may, I wish one of you children might become a novelist, but you never will, you will be farmers just like all us New England mountaineers.
"Learned men have discovered, by digging in the rocky surface of the earth, that under certain conditions, oysters or other animals, will turn to stone. They call them fossils. Scientists have also learned that each kind, wherever found, represents the age in which the animal lived. So, the fossil, you see, is an animal which died and turned to stone, perhaps millions of years ago.
"By investigation they find that one kind of rock, called azoic, contains no fossils, so they know there was a day or age when there was no life in this world, and this is the first day in the Bible, which I have been reading to you.
FIRST DAY
"They find by the conglomerate condition of the azoic rock that after the gaseous confusion of the elements had subsided, it sort of settled into one boiling mass of mixed elements. Then the heavier elements, gold, mercury, lead and the like, condensed and formed a center of attraction, while the more rare elements, such as oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, formed a floating band around it, then, as the Bible states, darkness must have been upon the face of the deep until the lighter elements rarefied, when the sun would feebly penetrate in the daytime and the rotation of the world would make it correspond to the first day and night of the Bible.