ns I cannot tell. How God will
require from the lion, or the crocodile, or the shark, who eats a human
being, the blood of their victims, is more than I can say. But this I
can say--that the feeling, not only of horror and pity, but of real rage
and indignation, with which men see (what God grant you never may see) a
wild beast kill a man, is a witness in man's conscience that the text is
true somehow, though how we know not. I received a letter a few weeks
since from an officer, a very remarkable person, in which he described
his horror and indignation at seeing a friend of his struck down and
eaten by a tiger, and how, when next day he stood over what had been but
the day before a human being, he looked up to heaven, and kept repeating
the words of the text, "in the image of God made He man," in rage and
shame, and almost accusing God for allowing His image to be eaten by a
brute beast. It shook, for the moment, his faith in God's justice and
goodness. That man was young then, and has grown calmer and wiser now,
and has regained a deeper and sounder faith in God. But the shock, he
said, was dreadful to him. He felt that the matter was not merely
painful and pitiable, but that it was a wrong and a crime; and on the
faith of this very text, a wrong and a crime I believe it to be, and one
which God knows how to avenge and to correct when man cannot. Somehow--
for He has ways of which we poor mortals do not dream--at the hand of
every beast will He require the blood of man.

But more; at the hand of every man will He require it. And how? The
text tells us, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
shed: for in the image of God made He man." Now, I do not doubt but
that the all-seeing God, looking back on what had most probably happened
on this earth already, and looking forward to what would happen, and
happens, alas! too often now, meant to warn men against the awful crime
of cannibalism, of eating their fellow-men as they would eat an animal.
By so doing, they not only treated their fellow-men as beasts, but they
behaved like beasts themselves. They denied that their victim was made
in the likeness of God; they denied that they were made in the likeness
of God; they willingly and deliberately put on the likeness of beasts,
and as beasts they were to perish. Now, this is certain, that savages
who eat men--and alas! there are thousands even now who do so--usually