Because the first question which man asks--the question which shows
he is a man and not a brute--always has been, and always will be--
Where am I? How did I get into this world; and how did this world
get here likewise? And if man takes up with a wrong answer to that
question, then the man himself is certain to go wrong in all manner
of ways. For a lie can never do anything but harm, or breed
anything but harm; and lies do breed, as fast as the blight on the
trees, or the smut on the corn: only being not according to nature,
or the laws of God, they do not breed as natural things do, after
their kind: but, belonging to chaos, the kingdom of disorder and
misrule, they breed fresh lies unlike themselves, of all strange and
unexpected shapes; so that when a man takes up with one lie, there
is no saying what other lie he may not take up with beside.

Wherefore the first thing man has to learn is truth concerning the
first human question, Where am I? How did I come here; and how did
this world come here? To which the Bible answers in its first line-
-

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

How God created, the Bible does not tell us. Whether he created (as
doubtless he could have done if he chose) this world suddenly out of
nothing, full grown and complete; or whether he created it (as he
creates you and me, and all living and growing things now) out of
things which had been before it--that the Bible does not tell us.

Perhaps if it had told us, it would have drawn away our minds to
think of natural things, and what we now call science, instead of
keeping our minds fixed, as it now does, on spiritual things, and