REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSION. 429 



truths of faith are concerned. Proving that the body 

 of the common ancestor of humanity is descended 

 from some higher form of ape, or from some extinct 

 anthropopithecus, would not necessarily contravene 

 either the declarations of Genesis, or the principles 

 regarding derivative creation which found acceptance 

 with the greatest of the Church's Fathers and Doc- 

 tors. 



Mr. Gladstone, in the work just quoted from, 

 expresses the same idea with characteristic force and 

 lucidity. " If," he says, "while Genesis asserts a sepa- 

 rate creation of man, science should eventually prove 

 that man sprang, by a countless multitude of indefi- 

 nitely small variations, from a lower, and even from 

 the lowest ancestry, the statement of the great 

 chapter would still remain undisturbed. For every 

 one of those variations, however minute, is abso- 

 lutely separate, in the points wherein it varies, from 

 what followed and also from what preceded it; is 

 in fact and in effect a distinct or separate creation. 

 And the fact that the variation is so small that, 

 taken singly, our use may not be to reckon it, is 

 nothing whatever to the purpose. For it is the finite- 

 ness of our faculties which shuts us off by a barrier 

 downward, beyond a certain limit, from the small, 

 as it shuts us off by a barrier upward from the 

 great; whereas for Him whose faculties are infinite, 

 the small and the great are, like the light and the 

 darkness, 'both alike,' and if man came up by in- 

 numerable stages from a low origin to the im- 

 age of God, it is God only who can say, as He 

 has said in other cases, which of those stages may 



