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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 4, Number 8
 August 1993 
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I'M a collector. I don't own any baseball cards,
Hummels, or paintings of Elvis on black velvet, but I do have shelves
of books by my favorite writers. My most complete shelves are of the
works of Samuel Johnson, G. K. Chesterton, Frank Sheed, C. S. Lewis,
Hilaire Belloc, John Henry Newman, and Ronald Knox. I think I have
just about everything Knox wrote. It is his translation of the New
Testament I read for private consolation. (When, a few years back,
I discovered that a few mint-condition, leather-bound copies of his
Bible were available at $65 apiece, I purchased two, on the theory
that if my home burned down I'd still have the copy I keep at the
office.)
A convert from Anglicanism, Knox excelled in every
academic and literary pursuit. He consistently shone as a satirist,
novelist, retreat master, sermonizer, translator, and scholar. He
was the consummate priest-intellectual. He died in 1957, a year shy
of three score and ten. Had he lived until eighty, opined Evelyn Waugh,
Knox would have become a national institution in Great Britain.
Many of Msgr. Knox's works are directly apologetical.
In this issue and the next we serialize, in our "Classic Apologetics"
department, a booklet printed in 1921, when Knox was 33. It doesn't
rank among his best works literarily, but it's a good response to
the evolutionist's claim that he can account for those qualities that
distinguish man from the animals. Even if bodily evolution were true,
says Knox, it couldn't supply a convincing explanation for the spiritual
in man.
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