to suppose that any one who is acquainted with the cosmogonies
of other nations--and especially with those of the Egyptians and
the Babylonians, with whom the Israelites were in such frequent
and intimate communication--should consider it to possess either
more, or less, scientific importance than may be allotted
to these.

Mr. Gladstone's definition of a sermon permits me to suspect
that he may not see much difference between that form of
discourse and what I call a myth; and I hope it may be something
more than the slowness of apprehension, to which I have
confessed, which leads me to imagine that a statement which is
"general" but "admits exceptions," which is "popular" and "aims
mainly at producing moral impression," "summary" and therefore
open to "criticism of detail," amounts to a myth, or perhaps
less than a myth. Put algebraically, it comes to this,
x=a+b+c; always remembering that there is nothing to show
the exact value of either a, or b, or c.
It is true that a is commonly supposed to equal 10, but
there are exceptions, and these may reduce it to 8, or 3, or 0;
b also popularly means 10, but being chiefly used by the
algebraist as a "moral" value, you cannot do much with it in the
addition or subtraction of mathematical values; c also is
quite "summary," and if you go into the details of which it is
made up, many of them may be wrong, and their sum total equal to
0, or even to a minus quantity.

Mr. Gladstone appears to wish that I should (1) enter upon a
sort of essay competition with the author of the pentateuchal
cosmogony; (2) that I should make a further statement about some