ogency to personal directivity,
does not show forth the Divine Personality as indwelling.

As soon as we grasp this obvious truth, we shall be led to find the
answer to that question which, as we saw, presents a stumbling-block to
many minds, namely, in what sense it is permissible to affirm the
Divine immanence in the animal world. How can God be in the denizens
of the jungle, we ask, feeling that to make such an statement
concerning Him is to empty the idea of God of all its meaning.
Natural, however, as such reasoning is, reflection will show it to be
faulty. To use a simple, if necessarily imperfect, illustration,
something of man's own being is in all his organs, but not all that
makes him man is in every one of them; certainly, his higher faculties
are not displayed in the organs designed to fulfil the lower functions
of the organism. To proceed to the obvious application--animals are
not moral beings, but act, with the occasional exception of such of
their number as have been humanised by contact with men, from instinct
and not from conscious choice; and for that reason we are not called
upon to reconcile the loving-kindness and tender mercy of God with the
habits and general behaviour of the lower creation. In ascribing all
sorts of moral qualities to animals we simply exhibit the same {38}
tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life
and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad,
presuppose conscious choice, a faculty of weighing and if necessary
repelling motives; and with such a faculty we have no reason for
crediting animals. No doubt, our incurable habit of reading the facts
of our own moral nature into the actions of beasts and birds accounts
for the vogue alike of Aesop's Fables and of such works as the _Jungle
Books_; but what strikes us as cruelty in the tiger is not a moral
quality at all, any more than it is a motive of heroism that impels the
mongoose to fight cobras. The tiger and the cobra are no more
deliberately "cruel" than they could be conceived as deliberately
"benevolent"; they are below the ethical level, expressing no character
at all, and least of all the character of God.

But if God is immanent in the cosmos as its pervading and sustaining
Power and Life; if He is immanent in man as that moral and spiritual
principle which reaches out after fuller communion with the Most High:
where shall we say that He Himself is _personally present