cult for us, living at the present day, to
understand this curious frame of mind; yet it certainly existed, and
existed where it might least have been expected to exist. Nor is it
quite extinct to-day, though it only lingers in the less instructed
class of persons. The misconception arose from a confusion between the
fact and the method of creation. As to the former, no Catholic, no
Christian, no theist has any kind of doubt; indeed there are those who
could not be classified under any of those categories who still would be
prepared to admit that there must be a First Cause as the explanation
of the universe. Some of them, whose reasoning is a little difficult to
follow, seem to be content with an immanent, blind god, a mere
mainspring to the clock, making it move, no doubt, but otherwise
powerless. If we neglect--in a mathematical sense--those who adopt the
agnostic attitude; content themselves with the formula _ignoramus et
ignorabimus_ of Du Bois Reymond, and confine their investigations to the
machine as a going machine without inquiring how it came to be a machine
or what set it to work, we shall, I think, find that most people who
have really thought out the question admit that the only reasonable
explanation of things as they are, is the postulation of a Free First
Cause; in other words, an Omnipotent Creator of the universe. Such, of
course, is the teaching of the Scriptures and of the Church, and it must
be admitted that neither of them carries us very much further in this
matter. In fact, whilst both are perfectly clear and definite about the
fact of creation, neither of them has much to say about the method. Yet,
as all admit, evolution concerns only the method and tells us absolutely
nothing about the cause.

Being omnipotent, it is obvious that its Maker might have created the
universe in any way which seemed good to Him--for example, all at once
out of nothing just as it stands at this moment. Such a thing would not
be impossible to Omnipotence; and, as we know, Fallopius, suddenly
confronted by the problems of fossils in the sixteenth century, did
suggest that they were created just as they were, and that they had
never been anything else. So did Philip Gosse some two and a half
centuries later.

There is nothing more sure than that the world was not created just as
it is. Reason and Scripture both teach us that, and geology makes it
quite clear that the appearance of living things upon the earth has bee