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146 MR. DARWIN'S CRITICS vO 
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 
itis 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 Catholie 
verity and Scientific verity is complete and 
absolute, quite independently of the truth or false- 
hood of the doctrine of evolution. But, for those 
who hold the doctrine of evolution, all the Catholie 
verities about the creation of living beings must 
