This is the view of the “Genesis of Species,” held by Suarez to be the only one consistent with Catholic faith:  it is because he holds this view to be Catholic that he does not hesitate to declare St. Augustin unsound, and St. Thomas Aquinas guilty of weakness, when the one swerved from this view and the other tolerated the deviation.  And, until responsible Catholic authority—­say, for example, the Archbishop of Westminster—­formally declares that Suarez was wrong, and that Catholic priests are free to teach their flocks that the world was not made in six natural days, and that plants and animals were not created in their perfect and complete state, but have been evolved by natural processes through long ages from certain germs in which they were potentially contained, I, for one, shall feel bound to believe that the doctrines of Suarez are the only ones which are sanctioned by Infallible Authority, as represented by the Holy Father and the Catholic Church.

I need hardly add that they are as absolutely denied and repudiated by Scientific Authority, as represented by Reason and Fact.  The question whether the earth and the immediate progenitors of its present living population were made in six natural days or not, is no longer one upon which two opinions can be held.

The fact that it did not so come into being stands upon as sound a basis as any fact of history whatever.  It is not true that existing plants and 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,