Almost at the same time that I was delivering my lectures at Berlin, Wasmann was giving a series of thoroughly Jesuitical lectures on the subject at Lucerne. The Catholic Lucerne journal, _Vaterland_, describes these lectures as "a work of emancipation" and "a critical moment in the intellectual struggle." It quotes the following sentence: "At the highest stage of the theistic philosophy of evolution is God, the omnipotent creator of heaven and earth; next to him, created by him, is the immortal soul of man. We reach this conclusion, not only by faith, but by inductive and strictly scientific methods. The system that is reared on the theistic doctrine of evolution is the sole rational and truly scientific system; the atheistic position is irrational and unscientific." In order to see the untruth of this and the succeeding statements of the modern Jesuits, we have to remember that the Churches--both Protestant and Catholic--have vigorously combated the theory of evolution with all their power for thirty years, ever since the first appearance of Darwinism. The shrewd clergy saw more clearly than many of our naïve philosophers that Darwin's theory of descent is the inevitable key-stone of the whole theory of evolution, and that "the descent of man from other mammals" is a rigorous deduction from it. As Karl Escherich well says: "Hitherto we read in the faces of our clerical opponents only hatred, bitterness, contempt, mockery, or pity in regard to the new invader of their dogmatic structure, the idea of evolution. Now (since Wasmann's apostasy) the assurances of the Catholic journals, that the Church has admitted the theory of evolution for decades, make us smile. Evolution has now pressed on to its final victory, and these people would have us believe that they were never unfriendly to it, never shrieked and stormed against it. How, they say, could anyone have been so foolish, when the theory of evolution puts the wisdom and power of the creator in a nobler light than ever." We find a similar diplomatic retreat in the popular work of the Jesuit, Father Martin Gander, _The Theory of Descent_ (1904): "Thus the modern forms of matter were not immediately created by God; they are effects of the formative forces, which were put by the creator in the primitive matter, and gradually came into view in the course of the earth's history, when the external conditions were given in the proper combination." That is a remarkable change of front on the part of the clergy.