The whole attack on the Church in connection with Galileo turns upon these two misunderstandings, of which the first is unessential, but the second capital: First, that a proved scientific fact was at issue; secondly, that this proved scientific fact was denied, because it was novel, and was denied by that authority which alone throughout the centuries had been held competent to establish points of doctrine, the Papacy and the councils of the Church over which it spiritually presides. The first is wrong and the second is wrong. The Copernican theory was not novel in Galileo’s time; it was still only a theory. His condemnation accuses him of returning to the _oldest_ conception (Pythagorean). He was not condemned by the Church, and the instance of his condemnation, such as it was, by the appointed committee, was his persistence in teaching as a proved fact what was still only hypothesis. Before leaving this overemphasised historical detail, I would like to make clear to the modern reader what our modern confused habit of mind often fails to grasp: the difference between teaching a thing as demonstrated fact and teaching it as hypothesis, coupled with the difference between teaching demonstrated fact and teaching metaphysical or doctrinal conclusions supposedly, but erroneously, dependent upon that fact. For that purpose I will choose a debate familiar to all our contemporaries: the discussion on the origins of the human body. In the last eighty years a very large and increasing body of evidence has been accumulated which points to the probability of the human body’s having come out of some original sub-human type, a sort of cousin to (though not descended from) the greater anthropoids of our own day. It may be so. There is nothing in such an hypothesis against any Catholic doctrine. On the other hand, it is not proved. Still less is it proved that the process was of an inevitable sort unconnected with divine Creative Will. Least of all is it proved--and indeed, it cannot be proved, for the thing is manifestly contradictory to our senses--that man as we know him is not a fixed type, utterly different in quality from the beasts. Now this hypothesis is almost universally stated to-day as a demonstrated fact--which as yet it most certainly is not; indeed, the guesses at the process continue to change year by year, as anyone can see for himself by looking up the common manuals of forty, thirty, twenty and ten years ago. Further, there is quite commonly tacked on to it a second statement, that the so-called demonstrated fact disproves a cardinal Catholic doctrine, to wit, the Fall of Man.