350 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



causes? When the Bible tells us that "the Lord 

 God formed man from the slime of the earth," are 

 we to interpret these words in a rigorously literal 

 sense, and to believe that the Creator actually fash- 

 ioned Adam from the slime of the earth, as a potter 

 would fashion an object from clay, or as an artist 

 would produce the model of a statue from wax or 

 plaster? Or, may we put a different interpretation 

 on the text and regard man, quoad corpus, as indi- 

 rectly created, as the last and highest term of a long 

 series of evolutions which extend back to the first 

 advent of life upon earth. In other words, is man, 

 as to his body, the direct and special work of the 

 Creator's hands, or is he the descendant of some 

 animal, some anthropoid ape or some "missing 

 link," of which naturalists as yet have discovered no 

 trace ? 



This is one of the burning questions of science ; 

 one which has given to Darwinism most of its noto- 

 riety and importance, and one which is inseparably 

 linked with every theory of organic Evolution by 

 whomsoever advocated. We have seen that, as 

 Catholics, we are at liberty to accept the theory of 

 Evolution as to all the multifarious forms of animal 

 and plant life, that it is, indeed, a probable, if not 

 the most probable, theory, and that far from derogat- 

 ing from the wisdom and omnipotence of God, it 

 affords us, on the contrary, a nobler conception of 

 the Deity than does the traditional view of special 

 creation. May we now extend the Evolution the- 

 ory so as to embrace the body of man, and allow 

 that it is no exception to the law which, we may 



