misdoubt my reading of the small-print
notes, and appeal to the text, yea, beyond the text, even to the God of
the sparrows Himself.

"I count it as belonging to the smallness of our faith, to the poorness
of our religion, to the rudimentary condition of our nature, that our
sympathy with God's creatures is so small. Whatever the narrowness of
our poverty-stricken, threadbare theories concerning them, whatever the
inhospitality and exclusiveness of our mean pride toward them, we can
not escape admitting that to them pain is pain, and comfort is comfort;
that they hunger and thirst; that sleep restores and death delivers
them: surely these are ground enough to the true heart wherefore it
should love and cherish them--the heart at least that believes with St.
Paul, that they need and have the salvation of Christ as well as we.
Right grievously, though blindly, do they groan after it.

"The ignorance and pride which is forever sinking us toward them, are
the very elements in us which mislead us in our judgment concerning
them, causing us to imagine them not upon a lower merely, but upon an
altogether different footing in creation from our own. The same things
we call by one name in us, and by another in them. How jealous have not
men been as to allowing them any share worthy the name of reason! But
you may see a greater difference in this respect between the lowest and
the highest at a common school, than you will between them and us. A
pony that has taught itself without hands to pump water for its thirst,
an elephant that puts forth its mighty lip to lift the moving wheel of
the heavy wagon over the body of its fallen driver, has rather more to
plead on the score of intellect than many a schoolboy. Not a few of them
shed tears. A bishop, one of the foremost of our scholars, assured me
that once he saw a certain animal laugh while playing off a practical
joke on another of a different kind from himself. I do not mention the
kind of animal, because it would give occasion for a silly articulate
joke, far inferior to his practical one. I go further, and say, that I
more than suspect a rudimentary conscience in every animal. I care not
how remotely rudimentary. There must be in the moral world absolute and
right potent germinal facts which lie infinitudes beyond the reach of
any moral microscope, as in the natural world beyond the most powerful
of lenses. Yet surely in this respect also, one may see betwixt boys at
the same