e made in
measure like unto Him, can we increase this our possession of charity,
of which the entire essence is in God only. But even the ordinary
exercise of this faculty implies a condition of the whole moral being
in some measure right and healthy, and to the entire exercise of it
there is necessary the entire perfection of the Christian character;
for he who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass
beneath his feet, and the creatures which live not for his uses,
filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not; while, on the
other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving
all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them, every
one, as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than
he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part be touched
more truly. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of S.
Francis of Assisi, who never spoke to bird or cicala, nor even to wolf
and beast of prey, but as his brother; and so we find are moved the
minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from
the mariner of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in the
Hartleap Well:--

'Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride,
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'

And again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that
anguish of our own

'Is tempered and allayed by sympathies,
Aloft ascending, and descending deep,
Even to the inferior kinds;'

so that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic
faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect,
than those accursed sports, in which man makes of himself, cat, tiger,
serpent, chaetodon, and alligator in one; and gathers into one
continuance of cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that brutes
sparingly, and at intervals, use against each other for their
necessities."

132. So much I had perceived, and said, you observe, good reader,
concerning S. Francis of Assisi, and his sermons, when I was only
five-and-twenty,--little thinking at that day how, Evangelical-bred as
I was, I should ever come to write a lecture for the first School of
Art in Oxford in the Sacristan's cell at Assisi,[25] or ever--among such
poor treasures as I have of friends' reliquaries--I should fondly keep
a little 'pinch' of his cloak.

[25] See 'Ariadne Florentina,' chap. v., Sec. 164; compare 'Fors,'