THE CHURCH AND MAN S ORIGIN 191 



The Supreme Intelligent Being, who alone is able 

 to create the personal, intelligent soul of man, we 

 call God not an impersonal, material, Monistic 

 god, that is nothing more than the material uni 

 verse itself, and therefore could not have called 

 into being life or intellect, wanting all these itself 

 from the beginning; but a personal, living, intel 

 ligent Creator. Since somewhere self-existence 

 must be postulated of some intelligent being, or 

 nothing could exist at all, we are forced by our 

 reason to come to this one Supreme Being, neces 

 sarily self-existent by His very nature, and so 

 above all mere finite and contingent matter, who 

 alone was capable of calling into existence mat 

 ter and force, life and soul. 



But what of the body of man? Again the at 

 titude of the Church is the only one that true sci 

 ence can countenance, when she holds it rash to 

 assert as a fact an evolution of which no 

 proofs exist. We have shown abundantly in the 

 preceding chapters that there is no vestige of sci 

 entific evidence that can prove the descent of man s 

 body from the brute, whether said to be derived 

 directly from the ape or else from some ances 

 tor common to both man and ape. The very fact 

 of the endless controversies over these matters 

 shows how far science is from having in any way 

 demonstrated the brute origin of the human body. 

 The idea of a unified design on the part of the 

 Creator throughout His creation, such as we 



