By the Editor
LASI week this paper, together with other leading religious papers accepted an advertisement for the "News Chronicle" on the grounds that among the popular Press that newspaper maintained high standards of objectivity and serious discussion of questions of the day.
We realised, of course, that a national paper of to-day is bound to fall very short of the standards which Catholics would like to see.
Nevertheless, we greatly regret that in the issue of last Tuesday, the "News Chronicle" saw tit to publish an article by Prof. Julian Huxley in reference to the Mrs. Knight controversy which It headed: "A Scientist has the last word in the Mrs. Knight debate."
That Prof. Huxley should be allowed to give his views on this question is reasonable enough even though those views seem to us astonishingly superficial. But that the "News Chronicle", after thus appealing for support in religious papers, should go out of its way to give hint "the last word" and leave many readers under the impression that it is "the last word" is lamentable.
We can only hope that any of our readers who responded to that advertisement will be the first to let the "News Chronicle" know what they think of the Professor's views.
Dr. Huxley in high-brow and oh, so reasonable language has sought to show that all human experience is explicable in terms of science and religion understood RS "the mysterious cosmic process." He leaves no doubt that whatever that may be it is not God in the Christian sense, nor iadeed in the sense of any of the great world religions.
If he is right in dismissing the cruder and more anthropomorphic interpretations of the Divine—not. by the way, to be found in St. Thomas—he can offer no explanation whatever of the capability of the human mind, however fully evolved, to discern good from evil, truth from error, beauty from ugliness.
In fact, the man he describes is an animated, enigmatic corpse without a spirit or an intellect capable of objective and final Judgments. No wonder his universe is without a God.