of man,
and--dare we add?--of angels. Doth He not feed the ravens? Do the young
lions not gather what He giveth? Doth a sparrow fall to the ground
without Our Father? and is not the unsinning multitude of Nineveh's
young children climaxed with "much cattle?" It is true, there may be
mighty difference between "the spirit of a man that goeth upward, and
the spirit of a beast that goeth downward in the earth:" but mark this,
there _is_ a spirit in the beast; and as man's eternal heaven may lie in
some superior sphere, so that temporarily designed for the lower animals
may be seen in the renovated earth. It is also true, that St. Paul,
arguing for the temporal livelihood of Christian ministers from the type
of "not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn," asks, "Doth God
care for oxen?"--or, in effect, doth He legislate (I speak soberly,
though the sublime treads on the ridiculous,) for a stable?--and the
implication is, "To thy dutiful husbandry, O man! such lesser cares are
left." Sorry, righteously sorry, would it make any good man's heart to
think that the Creator had ceased to care for the meanest of his
creatures: in a certain sense

"He sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall;"

and, assured that carelessness in a just Creator of his poor dependent
creatures must be impossible, I submit that, critically speaking, some
laudable variation might be made in that text by the simple
consideration that [Greek: melei] is not so strictly rendered "care for"
as [Greek: kedetai]. Scripture, then, so far from militating against the
possible truth, that animals have souls, would seem, by a side-long
glance, to countenance the doctrine: and now let us for a passing moment
turn and see what aid is given to us by moral philosophy.

No case can be conceived more hard or more unjust than that of a
sentient creature (on the hypothesis of its having no soul, no
conscience, necessarily quite innocent), thrown into a world of cruelty
and tyranny, without the chance of compensation for sufferings
undeserved. Neither can any good government be so partial, as (limiting
the whole existence of animals to an hour, a day, a year,) to allow one
of a litter to be pampered with continual luxuries, and another to be
tortured for all its little life by blows, famine, disease--and in its
lingering death by the scientific scalpels of a critical Majendie or a
cold-blooded Spallanzani. Remember, that in the so-call