and seas and rivers, its
agglomeration of hard and soft, of hot and cold, of moist and dry? If
he could, then the portion that least can be supposed to feel or know,
is regarded by the apostle of love as immeasurably more important than
the portion that loves and moans and cries. Nor is this all; for
thereupon he attributes the suffering-faculty of the excluded, far more
sentient portion at least, to the altogether inferior and less sentient,
and upon the ground of that faculty builds the vision of its redemption!
If it could be so, then how should the seeming apostle's affected
rhapsody of hope be to us other than a mere puff-ball of falsest
rhetoric, a special-pleading for nothing, as degrading to art as
objectless in nature?

Much would I like to know clearly what animals the apostle saw on his
travels, or around his home when he had one--their conditions, and their
relations to their superiors. Anyhow they were often suffering
creatures; and Paul was a man growing hourly in likeness to his maker
and theirs, therefore overflowing with sympathy. Perhaps as he wrote,
there passed through his mind a throb of pity for the beasts he had to
kill at Ephesus.

If the Lord said very little about animals, could he have done more for
them than tell men that his father cared for them? He has thereby
wakened and is wakening in the hearts of men a seed his father planted.
It grows but slowly, yet has already borne a little precious fruit. His
loving friend St Francis has helped him, and many others have tried,
and are now trying to help him: whoever sows the seed of that seed the
Father planted is helping the Son. Our behaviour to the animals, our
words concerning them, are seed, either good or bad, in the hearts of
our children. No one can tell to what the animals might not grow, even
here on the old earth under the old heaven, if they were but dealt with
according to their true position in regard to us. They are, in sense
very real and divine, our kindred. If I call them our poor relations, it
is to suggest that poor relations are often ill used. Relatives, poor or
rich, may be such ill behaved, self-assertive, disagreeable persons,
that we cannot treat them as we gladly would; but our endeavour should
be to develop every true relation. He who is prejudiced against a
relative because he is poor, is himself an ill-bred relative, and to be
ill-bred is an excluding fault with the court of the high countries.
There, poverty is wel