moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our
thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but
noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his
kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing
apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genius:
and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus[11] of an
unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with
the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the
swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of
brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and
here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see
confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it
stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of well-doing and this
doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this
earth, from the frosty top of Everest[12] to the next margin of the
internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of
pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth[13] and
travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law of life.
The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and
forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the
dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love
of an ideal: strive like us--like us are tempted to grow weary of the
struggle--to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment,
visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to
be crucified between that double law[14] of the members and the will.
Are they like us, I wonder in the timid hope of some reward, some
sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues,
at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be
just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked?
It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even while
they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treads them by
thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the
bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the
vivisectionist;[15] or the dew falls, and the generation of a day is
blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our weakness
is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in