ious books, but it made, none the
less, a great stir; again the opposing army trooped forth, though
evidently with much less heart than before. A few were very violent.
The Dublin University Magazine, after the traditional Hibernian fashion,
charged Mr. Darwin with seeking "to displace God by the unerring action
of vagary," and with being "resolved to hunt God out of the world." But
most notable from the side of the older Church was the elaborate
answer to Darwin's book by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr.
Constantin James. In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, published
at Paris in 1877, Dr. James not only refuted Darwin scientifically but
poured contempt on his book, calling it "a fairy tale," and insisted
that a work "so fantastic and so burlesque" was, doubtless, only a huge
joke, like Erasmus's Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters.
The princes of the Church were delighted. The Cardinal Archbishop
of Paris assured the author that the book had become his "spiritual
reading," and begged him to send a copy to the Pope himself. His
Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowledged the gift in a remarkable letter. He
thanked his dear son, the writer, for the book in which he "refutes
so well the aberrations of Darwinism." "A system," His Holiness adds,
"which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples,
to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would
seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning
toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this
tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of
all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own
king, his own priest, and his own God--pride goes so far as to degrade
man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of
lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration,
WHEN PRIDE COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME. But the corruption of this age,
the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that
such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should--since they
borrow the mask of science--be refuted by true science." Wherefore the
Pope thanked Dr. James for his book, "so opportune and so perfectly
appropriate to the exigencies of our time," and bestowed on him the
apostolic benediction. Nor was this brief all. With it there came
a second, creating the author an officer of the Papal