On Reading Some Lines in Horace (verse)
Stuart, Henry Longan
December 8, I926 THE COMMONWEAL I23 Dozens of other similar statements could be cited from Catholic theologians, but the one given, which is official, is suffident. A recent work, entitled...
...To anyone sincerely desiring to probe matters to the bottom who is not afflicted with what Father Wasmann, S.J., a most distinguished biologist and theistic evolutionist, calls "theophobia," the Catholic doctrine above enunciated will prove to be the only full and satisfying answer...
...When a young man of most holy life studying law at Padua, he was so near unto death as to have received the last sacraments...
...Subsequently many papal physicians and surgeons were also anatomists and published their writings on the subject under the very noses of suc-cessive Popes...
...For example, the evolutionary theory, as usually formulated, postu- lates the existence of a world of unicellular organisms at an early period...
...Let us imagine two billiard players, each having a hundred balls to direct...
...These organisms, on the showing of Weismann, were potentially immortal, for death is the price which we pay for having a body, as some-body puts it...
...Orthogenesis, the urge of an internal force, is an alternative explanation quite fashionable with some today, but branded as "mystical" again by others...
...He recovered and in making the speech of laudation conferring on him of the doctorate, Panciroli, his pro- fessor, alluded thus to the occurrence: "Humane, charitable, compassionate, even to the length of be-queathing your body to the public welfare when you saw yoursel~: at the gates of death...
...the other, with one stroke, sets all the bails in motion, as he will...
...Well, have it so, but then please explain the thing un- mystically...
...A recent work, entitled Reflective Thinking, very properly argues that evolution is not self-explanatory...
...He may have been right or wrong, but that is how it was...
...Father Weismann, S.J., a man of science who is also a member of a strict relig- ious order, shall end this discussion: If we assume that God is the creator of all things, and that the world created by Him had evolved independently and automatically, we have actually a greater idea of God than if we regard Him as constantly interfering with the work- ing of the laws of nature...
...Saint Thomas Aquinas stated long ago that the force of any cause was the greater, the further its action extended...
...Now those who hold that view must tell us where this orthogenetic principle came from...
...His argument, which is too long to be quoted in an article of this length, should be studied in the setting of the book itself...
...What did...
...Crusaders, like other persons, had a fancy for being buried near their own homes, and comrades would promise, in the event of their death, to see that this was done...
...That is mysticism," I suppose, will be the response...
...Baffled in that respect, White alleged that this bull was used as a cover to prohibit the use of cadavers in the study of human anatomy...
...The one needs a hundred strokes in order to accomplish his end...
...Take one further incident, from the life of Saint Francis de Sales...
...The latter is undoubtedly the more skilful player...
...Nay, but of the heart that takes Vows and sighs their worth above-- Who has told, the morn it wakes On a world all lost for love ? HENRY LONGAN STUART...
...Creative impulse answers that question, and there is no other intelligible answer known to me...
...This is by no means a new principle, but a very old one, and it shows that the theory of evolution, as a scientific hypothesis and theory, as far as it can be proved, is perfectly compatible with the Christian theory of the orlg/n of things...
...Walsh has shown that the bull in question did nothing of the kind, for it re- lated entirely to a custom which had grown up during the Crusades...
...Stenson, an anatomist of great distinc- tion, was made a bishop, not, of course, on that ac-count, but it cast no shadow over his orthodoxy...
...It was not easy in those days to embalm or otherwise preserve bodies and the custom grew up of boiling off the flesh, and taking the bones along home...
...Nothing in the way of natural selection could well have been at work, and if there had been, it is not easy to see why it should urge the unicellular on to multicellularity...
...He expressed the wish to his tutor that his body should be handed over to the medical school for the purposes of dissec- tion, in order to lessen that much the horrible scenes of body-snatching which were a disgrace to the city...
...According to this view, the evolution of the organic world is but a little line in the book of the evolution of the whole universe, on the title-page of which still stands, written in indelible letters: "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth...
...That is nonsense, for Mondini, one of the first to perform dissections, performed them in Bologna in the second decade of the century of the bull in question...
...per omnes deos, te oro . . ." Patient of the dust and goad, Let the ox the pastures scent, Then, how heavy pulls the load, All his task turned punishment...
...The aboriginal stuff, or material from which a mater- ialistic philosophy starts, is incapable of evolution...
...The Pope thought it was an un- seemly method and forbade it...
...Whitehead most truly says "a thoroughgoing evolu-tionary philosophy is inconsistent with materialism...
...December 8, I926 THE COMMONWEAL I23 Dozens of other similar statements could be cited from Catholic theologians, but the one given, which is official, is suffident...
...A charge drawn up by White which proclaimed that the Church had done deadly injury to the cause of learning by strictly forbidding the dissection of the human body, was based by him on a bull of Pope Boniface VIII of I3oo...
...Qod does not interfere directly in the natural order where He can work through natural causes...
...Turn which way you will, the Catholic explanation does not sin against science nor against common sense, as the materialistic explanation does...
...On Reading Some Lines in Horace "'Lydia, dic...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 5
