he belonged. This mistake is
partly due to that lamentable ignorance of Catholic teaching, not to say
that lamentable incapacity for clear thinking, on these matters, which
afflicts some non-Catholic writers. Let us take an example from an
eminently fairly written book, in which, dealing with Buffon, the author
says: "I cannot agree with those who think that Buffon was an
out-and-out evolutionist, who concealed his opinions for fear of the
Church. No doubt he did trim his sails--the palpably insincere _Mais
non, il est certain par la revelation que tous les animaux ont egalement
participe a la grace de la creation_, following hard upon the too bold
hypothesis of the origin of all species from a single one, is proof of
it." Of course it is nothing of the kind, for, whatever Buffon may have
meant, and none but himself could tell us, it is perfectly clear that
whether creation was mediate (as under transformism considered from a
Christian point of view it would be) or immediate, every created thing
would participate in the grace of creation, which is just the point
which the writer from whom the quotation has been made has missed.

The same writer furnishes us with the real explanation of Buffon's
attitude when he says that Buffon was "too sane and matter-of-fact a
thinker to go much beyond his facts, and his evolution doctrine remained
always tentative." Buffon, like many another man, from St. Augustine
down to his own times, considered the transformist explanation of living
nature. He saw that it unified and simplified the conceptions of species
and that there were certain facts which seemed strongly to support it.
But he does not seem to have thought that they were sufficient to
establish it and he puts forward his views in the tentative manner which
has just been suggested.

The fact is that those who father the accusations with which we have
been dealing either do not know, or scrupulously conceal their
knowledge, that what they proclaim to be scientific cowardice is really
scientific caution, a thing to be lauded and not to be decried.

Let us turn to apply the considerations with which we have been
concerned to the case of Galileo, to which generally misunderstood
affair we must very briefly allude, since it is the standby of
anti-Catholic controversialists. Monsignor Benson, in connection with
the quotation recently cited, proclaimed himself "a violent defender of
the Cardinals against Galileo." Perhaps no one wi