He is too near of kin to the Positivists themselves, and adopts too 10 many of their principles and conclusions, to be able to battle effectively against them. No doubt he urges much that is true against them, but his arguments, as far as effective, are inconsistent with his position as a Protestant, and are borrowed from Catholicity, or from what he has retained from Catholic instruction and Catholic tradition, not from his Protestantism. Having no authority but his own private interpretation of the Scriptures to define what is or is not Christianity, he knows not how much or how little he must defend against the Positivists, or how much or how little he is free to concede to them. He practically concedes to them the Creator. He defends God as the efficient cause, indeed, but not as Creator, producing all things by his word from nothing. He would seem to hold it enough to defend him as the organizer and disposer of materials already furnished to his hand. God does not seem to him to be his own _causa materialis_. He works on a pre-existing matter. He constructs, the author concedes, the existing worlds out of “star-dust,” or disintegrated stars, without telling us who made the stars that have dissolved and turned to dust, and without bearing in mind, or without knowing, that Christianity teaches us that “in the beginning God _created_ the heavens and the earth,” and therefore could not have formed them out of “star-dust” or any other material. The Protestant divine accepts and defends Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by “natural selection,” though he does not believe that it applies universally, or that man has been developed from the ape or the tadpole. He denies that Huxley’s protoplasm can be developed from protein, or life from dead matter; maintains that all life proceeds from a living organism, that the plant can spring only from a seed, and the animal only from a living cell or germ; and yet concedes that some of the lower forms of organic life may spring or may have sprung from spontaneous generation, and even goes so far as to tell us that some of the most eminent of the fathers held or conceded as much. What becomes, then, of the assertion that life cannot be evolved from dead matter? He would seem to hold or to concede that man lived, for an indefinite time, a purely animal life, before the Almighty breathed into his nostrils and he became a spiritual man, and quotes to prove it St. Paul’s assertion that “not first that which is spiritual, but that which is animal; afterwards that which is spiritual” (1 Cor. xv. 46). He seems, in fact, ready to concede any and everything except the intelligent Mind recognized by Plato and Aristotle, that has arranged all things according to a preconceived plan, and throughout the whole adapted means to ends. He insists on efficient causes and final causes, but hardly on God as the _causa causarum_ or as the _causa finalis_ of all particular final causes.