to insist
upon; I only care to argue that the word _creature_ or _creation_ must
include everything in creation that has sentient life. That I should in
the class include a greater number of phenomena than a reader may be
prepared to admit, will nowise affect the force of what I have to say,
seeing my point is simply this: that in the term _creation_, Paul
comprises all creatures capable of suffering; the condition of which
sentient, therefore superior portion, gives him occasion to speak of
the whole creation as suffering in the process of its divine evolution
or development, groaning and travailing as in the pangs of giving birth
to a better self, a nobler world. It is not necessary to the idea that
the creation should know what it is groaning after, or wherein the
higher condition constituting its deliverance must consist. The human
race groans for deliverance: how much does the race know that its
redemption lies in becoming one with the Father, and partaking of his
glory? Here and there one of the race knows it--which is indeed a pledge
for the race--but the race cannot be said to know its own lack, or to
have even a far-off notion of what alone can stay its groaning. In like
manner the whole creation is groaning after an unforeseen yet essential
birth--groans with the necessity of being freed from a state that is but
a transitional and not a true one, from a condition that nowise answers
to the intent in which existence began. In both the lower creation and
the higher, this same groaning of the fettered idea after a freer life,
seems the first enforced decree of a holy fate, and itself the first
movement of the hampered thing toward the liberty of another birth.

To believe that God made many of the lower creatures merely for prey, or
to be the slaves of a slave, and writhe under the tyrannies of a cruel
master who will not serve his own master; that he created and is
creating an endless succession of them to reap little or no good of
life but its cessation--a doctrine held by some, and practically
accepted by multitudes--is to believe in a God who, so far as one
portion at least of his creation is concerned, is a demon. But a
creative demon is an absurdity; and were such a creator possible, he
would not be God, but must one day be found and destroyed by the real
God. Not the less the fact remains, that miserable suffering abounds
among them, and that, even supposing God did not foresee how creation
would turn out