All this comes out most clearly at the very opening of his discussion of human origins on pages 37 and 38. He there exposes in one paragraph all that ignorance to which I allude. He says with rather ponderous sarcasm that the Catholic Church is no more committed to a denial of the now widely accepted view of man’s origin “than it is to a doctrine of a flat earth, or of a stationary earth round which the sun revolves”; but adds that though the Church is apparently not committed to any particular view in such matters (he has grasped that much), yet “many believers dissent from the scientific opinion _because they feel it is more seemly to suppose that man has fallen rather than risen_” (my italics). In that one sentence on Original Sin you have the whole of the writer’s ignorance upon the matter (and upon the very terms used in its discussion) exposed. It is as though some foreigner were to say of English constitutional practice: “The English legal system is not committed to the denial of historical evidence on the vices of James the First, but many individual lawyers believe that the King can do no wrong—because they think it more seemly.” Why did he not look up the point in any book of reference? It is astonishing to me that, with his active mind and interest in his contemporaries, and his reliance upon books of reference, he has not done so. The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin has nothing to do with the stages of man’s material culture. The fact that man now in Europe uses iron in places where he once used stone for his implements, has no possible connection with the doctrine of Original Sin. The traces of beings not men but, as are apes, man-like, exceptionally discovered, and belonging presumably to a remote past, can no more affect the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin than Pasteur’s discovery of fermentation being due to a micro-organism affects the truth that men can and do get drunk. The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin is this. That man, our known human nature as true men, was created by God to be supernatural, that is, enjoying beatitude; but fell, through the rebellion of his will, into a natural state. This, and this alone, says the Catholic Faith, explains man’s dual destiny, his sense of exile, the lack of correspondence between his ideal and his practice. It is not “many individuals” in the Catholic Church who affirm this great and luminous doctrine because it is “more seemly.” It is _all_ Catholics who affirm it, and they do so because, whether pleasant or unpleasant, it is true.