The reader had been absently stabbing at his fish with an aimless fork. He now laid down his paper to give the food his entire attention.
"You see," began Floud, "I say one brother is quite as extreme as the other."
Father Riley smiled affably, and begged Whittaker to finish the letter.
"Your fish is fresh, dear man, but your news may be stale before we reach it--so hasten now--I've a presentiment that our friend goes still farther afield."
Whittaker abandoned his fish with a last thoughtful look, and resumed the reading.
"May I conclude by reminding you that the issue between Christianity and science falsely so called has never been enough simplified? Christianity rests squarely on the Fall of man. Deny the truth of Genesis and the whole edifice of our faith crumbles. If we be not under the curse of God for Adam's sin, there was never a need for a Saviour, the Incarnation and the Atonement become meaningless, and our Lord is reduced to the status of a human teacher of a disputable philosophy--a peasant moralist with certain delusions of grandeur--an agitator and heretic whom the authorities of his time executed for stirring up the people. In short, the divinity of Jesus must stand or fall with the divinity of the God of Moses, and this in turn rests upon the historical truth of Genesis. If the Fall of man be successfully disputed, the God of Moses becomes a figment of the Jewish imagination--Jesus becomes man. And this is what Science asserts, while we of the outer churches, through cowardice or indolence--too often, alas! through our own skepticism--have allowed Science thus to obscure the issue. We have fatuously thought to surrender the sin of Adam, and still to keep a Saviour--not perceiving that we must keep both or neither.
"There is the issue. The Church says that man is born under the curse of God and so remains until redeemed, through the sacraments of the Church, by the blood of God's only begotten Son.
"Science says man is not fallen, but has risen steadily from remote brute ancestors. If science be right--and by _mere evidence_ its contention is plausible--then original sin is a figment and natural man is a glorious triumph over brutehood, not only requiring no saviour--since he is under no curse of God--but having every reason to believe that the divine favour has ever attended him in his upward trend.