these precious associations, he
breaks out with:

"Mine is no narrow creed;
And He who gave thee being did not frame
The mystery of life to be the sport
Of merciless man. There is another world
For all that live and move--a better one!
Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine
Infinite goodness to the little bounds
Of their own charity, may envy thee!"

When we turn to the first of all books, the dog certainly appears to
receive harsh treatment. The term "dog" is invariably one of reproach.
Goliath cursing David asks, "Am I a dog?" Abner exclaims, "Am I a dog's
head?" St. Paul refers to false prophets as dogs. In the Psalms the dog
is found to be synonymous with the devil; in the Gospels it stands for
unholy men. Evil-workers are dogs; a dog is the equivalent of a fool;
nothing is lower than a dog, and nothing is to be more abhorred. Finally,
there is that hardest sentence of all--"Without are dogs"; as though any
hope for dogs was entirely forbidden. It is the same throughout: the
depraved of mankind are dogs, and the very acme of possible reproach and
contempt is apparently to be found in the use of this one term. Abandon
hope;--without, are you who are dogs!

But is the use of this term "dog" to be taken literally? There seems to
be ample evidence that it should not be. The very extravagance of the
language raises a doubt at once, just as the grotesqueness of the
application of the term shows that the dog itself could never have been
meant. St. Paul speaks of false prophets as dogs because of their
impudence and love of gain--characteristics hardly to be attributed to
the animal itself. The term "dead dog" was the most opprobrious to which
a Jew could lay his tongue; when David endeavoured to convey to the mind
of Saul that the persecution to which he was subjecting him was a
dishonour to himself, he asked him whom he was pursuing; was he pursuing
"after a dead dog"? If, as Horace has it, "death is the utmost boundary
of wealth and power," it is surely no less so of pursuit.

Then again, in the Psalms, David writes, "Deliver my soul from the sword,
my darling from the power of the dog"; in other words, the devil. All
dogs are not good dogs, though all dogs are good dogs to their respective
owners; but no dog can possibly be classed as we find him here, or as the
very image and likeness of the most d