EVOLUTION AND GENESIS 109 



entirely satisfactory and reasonable, as well as 

 perfectly consonant with God's Providence when 

 he says: 



It is a striking fact that the Bible presents to us Thare 

 and Abraham as believers in the one true God; and it would 

 seem as though from the days of Noe, God had preserved for 

 Himself a portion of the human race untainted by the pre- 

 vailing idolatry. He had revealed Himself to Adam and again 

 to Noe; yet it is implied all through this early period of the 

 history, that, in spite of the defection of the vast majority of 

 mankind, there was always a chosen seed which did not 

 stand in need of a new revelation of what had once been de- 

 clared, though it did at times call for drastic purification from 

 the errors which had inevitably crept in through contact with 

 the unbelievers in whose midst they lived. It would seem, 

 then, more in accodance with the facts to suppose that all along 

 the course of the history the true account of God's dealings 

 with man and of His formation of the world and of the human 

 race had been preserved undiluted and was handed down from 

 century to century. Indeed, when we come to reflect upon it, 

 a purification of the Chaldean account of the Creation or of 

 the Flood would have involved an almost radical change of 

 the accounts. 2 



While we are not, therefore, obliged to es- 

 tablish a chronological parallel between the Scrip- 

 ture account and that of science, yet, when ac- 

 tually made, such a parallel discloses the most 

 wonderful harmony of all the facts and even of 

 the most highly probable theories of geology, as- 

 tronomy, optics, biology, paleotology, etc., with 

 the simple narrative of Holy Writ. 



It is sufficiently understood by all, at the pres- 



'"The Catholic Student's 'Aids' to the Bible," pp. 197, 198- 



