Darwin with seeking "to displace
God by the unerring action of vagary," and with being "resolved to
hunt God out of the world." But most notable from the side of the
older Church was the elaborate answer to Darwin's book by the
eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James. In his
work, _On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape_, published at Paris in 1877, Dr.
James not only refuted Darwin scientifically but poured contempt
on his book, calling it "a fairy tale," and insisted that a work
"so fantastic and so burlesque" was, doubtless, only a huge joke,
like Erasmus's _Praise of Folly_, or Montesquieu's _Persian Letters_.
The princes of the Church were delighted. The Cardinal Archbishop
of Paris assured the author that the book had become his
"spiritual reading," and begged him to send a copy to the Pope
himself. His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowledged the gift in a
remarkable letter. He thanked his dear son, the writer, for the
book in which he "refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism.
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