animals came into being within three days of the creation
of the earth out of nothing, for it is certain that innumerable
generations of other plants and animals lived upon the earth before
its present population. And when, Sunday after Sunday, men who profess
to be our instructors in righteousness read out the statement, "In
six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them
is," in innumerable churches, they are either propagating what they
may easily know, and, therefore, are bound to know, to be falsities;
or, if they use the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below
the moral standard of the much-abused Jesuit.

Thus far the contradiction between Catholic verity and Scientific
verity is complete and absolute, quite independently of the truth or
falsehood of the doctrine of evolution. But, for those who hold the
doctrine of evolution, all the Catholic verities about the creation of
living beings must be no less false. For them, the assertion that
the progenitors of all existing plants were made on the third day, of
animals on the fifth and sixth days, in the forms they now present, is
simply false. Nor can they admit that man was made suddenly out of the
dust of the earth; while it would be an insult to ask an evolutionist
whether he credits the preposterous fable respecting the fabrication
of woman to which Suarez pins his faith. If Suarez has rightly stated
Catholic doctrine, then is evolution utter heresy. And such I believe
it to be. In addition to the truth of the doctrine of evolution,
indeed, one of its greatest merits in my eyes, is the fact that it
occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism to that
vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and
social life of mankind--the Catholic Church. No doubt, Mr. Mivart,
like other putters of new wine into old bottles, is actuated by
motives which are worthy of respect, and even of sympathy; but his
attempt has met with the fate which the Scripture prophesies for all
such.

Catholic theology, like all theologies which are based upon the
assumption of the truth of the account of the origin of things given
in the Book of Genesis, being utterly irreconcilable with the doctrine
of evolution, the student of science, who is satisfied that the
evidence upon which the doctrine of evolution rests, is incomparably
stronger and better than that upon which the supposed authority of
the Book of Genesis rests, w