The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1922-04-28

the same could be said today of Pas teur, de Lapparent, Mendel an Abbott and Johannes Muller ("the greatest anatomist and physiologist among my contemporaries The off, cial attitude is made clear in one of the Encyclicals of Pope Leo XII, wise thought and every useful dis covery ought to be gladly welcomed and gratefully received by us, what ever it's origin may have been.'' 2. On the road leading to the ques- tion there are official utterances. (a) God created all things. It is the Bib | Hcal statement and one which can | not be controverted even by those who do not believe in it. "The so-call- ed a priori arguments against theism and, given a deity. against the pos sibility of creative acts, appear to me | to be devoid of reasonable foundation" Huxley. Many similar quotations could be given but the position is plain.
 (b) God might have created the world in ahy way pleasing to Himself. | That follows from the above. He | might, as Fallopius in the days of | ignorance on the subject and Philip | Gosse when they had long passed by | both thought was the case, have ere | taed it. fossils and all, just as it stands. It is abundantly clear that he did not.
 Negative Pieces of Information.
 3. There are negative pieces of in-
  sion (a) The church is in no way committed to the chronology found in Protestant editions of the Bible and compiled by a Protestant Bish- fix an authoritative chronology of the Bible,' says the Catholic Encylclo- paedia- The time does not seem near at hand, nor is it at all likely that any complete chronology such as has been essayed (without much success) by many men of science will ever be attempted.
 Cbl The church is neither commit ted to the crude and unthinka ble Mil tonic idea of creation nor to the rigid special creation vie of Linnaeus which still holds sway in many minds that there are as many species as God originally created individuals This entails an idea of specials which is increasingly difficult to hold In a word, while the church insists on the fact of creation, she has never expressed any opinion as to it's meth cd.
 4. We can fall back on the utter ances of fathers of the church and of later writers whose books have been published with an imprimatur, which, by the way, contrary to the general ly received but quite ignorant idea, in no way covers their scientific or historical facts, but merely asserts nothing in-that part of the book which may border on theology which con- tradicts any attitude" of the church.
 Now from the time of St. Angus tine of Hippo in the fourth century there has been a constant stream of suggestion that at the creation many, almost certainly most living things were created, as he put its "poten- tally and so as not then to appear, hut only as an unfolded product when the time for them had arrived. Not be 1t noted, by what is called, very fOolishly, an interference The clockmaker does not '.interfere' to make the clock strike when we hear it chiming out midnight. He made ago, but also centuries after St. Au- Fit just so that it should strike at that time. St Thomas Aquinas centuries gustine, mentions this thesis with ap- proval and in the best writings of to- day what the last important writer, Professor de Dorlodot of Louvain University Ca palaeontologist) calls the moderate view is adopted-a view which is exactly that which was defined byDarwin himself when he wrote of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator iu.o a few forms or one'' Cthe last words were penciled in the origina) and that" from so simple a beginning endless forms most beauti- ful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved
 In these days there are quite a number of books which might be cited in which this view is taken up; two passages will sufnee;
 Desert Creation and Evolution.
 Father wasmann. S. J., the eminent authority on ants, and, indeed. on bio logy gencr ally, when expressing his concurreEce with this view says: My