veri, et inter se distincti commemorantur, ut Exod. 20 dicitur, Sex diebus operabis et facies omnia opera tua, septimo autem die Sabbatum Domini Dei tui est.  Et infra:  Sex enim diebus fecit Dominus caelum et terram et mare et omnia quae in eis sunt, et idem repetitur in cap. 31.  In quibus locis sermonis proprietas colligi potest tum ex aequiparatione, nam cum dicitur:  sex diebus operabis, propriissime intelligitur:  tum quia non est verisimile, potuisse populum intelligere verba illa in alio sensu, et e contrario incredibile est, Deum in suis praeceptis tradendis illis verbis ad populum fuisse loquutum, quibus deciperetur, falsum sensum concipiendo, si Deus non per sex veros dies opera sua fecisset.”

These passages leave no doubt that this great doctor of the Catholic Church, of unchallenged authority and unspotted orthodoxy, not only declares it to be Catholic doctrine that the work of creation took place in the space of six natural days; but that he warmly repudiates, as inconsistent with our knowledge of the Divine attributes, the supposition that the language which Catholic faith requires the believer to hold that God inspired, was used in any other sense than that which He knew it would convey to the minds of those to whom it was addressed.

And I think that in this repudiation Father Suarez will have the sympathy of every man of common uprightness, to whom it is certainly “incredible” that the Almighty should have acted in a manner which He would esteem dishonest and base in a man.

But the belief that the universe was created in six natural days is hopelessly inconsistent with the doctrine of evolution, in so far as it applies to the stars and planetary bodies; and it can be made to agree with a belief in the evolution of living beings only by the supposition that the plants and animals, which are said to have been created on the third, fifth, and six days, were merely the primordial forms, or rudiments, out of which existing plants and animals have been evolved; so that, on these days, plants and animals were not created actually, but only potentially.

The latter view is that held by Mr. Mivart, who follows St. Augustin, and implies that he has the sanction of Suarez.  But, in point of fact, the latter great light of orthodoxy takes no small pains to give the most explicit and direct contradiction to all such imaginations, as the following passages prove.  In the first place, as regards plants, Suarez discusses the problem:—­

    “Quomodo herba virens et caetera vegetabilia hoc [tertio] die
    fuerint producta.[1]