ns! How could I even attempt to justify
the injury, save on the plea that I am already better and more valuable
than he; that I am the stronger; that the possession of all the
pleasures of human intelligence gives me the right to turn the poor
innocent joys of his senses into pains before which, threatening my own
person, my very soul would grow gray with fear? Or let me grant what
many professional men deny utterly, that some knowledge of what is
called practical value to the race has been thus attained--what can be
its results at best but the adding of a cubit to the life? Grant that it
gave us an immortal earthly existence, one so happy that the most
sensual would never wish for death: what would it be by such means to
live forever? God in Heaven! who, what is the man who would dare live a
life wrung from the agonies of tortured innocents? Against the will of
my Maker, live by means that are an abhorrence to His soul! Such a life
must be all in the flesh! the spirit could have little share therein.
Could it be even a life of the flesh that came of treason committed
against essential animality? It could be but an abnormal monstrous
existence, that sprang, toadstool-like, from the blood-marsh of
cruelty--a life neither spiritual nor fleshey, but devilish.

"It is true we are above the creatures--but not to keep them down; they
are for our use and service, but neither to be trodden under the foot of
pride, nor misused as ministers, at their worst cost of suffering, to
our inordinate desires of ease. After no such fashion did God give them
to be our helpers in living. To be tortured that we might gather ease!
none but a devil could have made them for that! When I see a man who
professes to believe not only in a God, but such a God as holds His
court in the person of Jesus Christ, assail with miserable cruelty the
scanty, lovely, timorous lives of the helpless about him, it sets my
soul aflame with such indignant wrath, with such a sense of horrible
incongruity and wrong to every harmony of Nature, human and divine, that
I have to make haste and rush to the feet of the Master, lest I should
scorn and hate where He has told me to love. Such a wretch, not content
that Christ should have died to save men, will tear Christ's living
things into palpitating shreds, that he may discover from them how
better to save the same men. Is this to be in the world as He was in the
world! Picture to yourselves one of these Christian inquir