t essential to your enjoyment in it, that nothing less than
yourself should share its realization? Are you the lowest kind of
creature that _could_ be permitted to live? Had God been of like heart
with you, would he have given life and immortality to creatures so much
less than himself as we? Are these not worth making immortal? How, then,
were they worth calling out of the depth of no-being? It is a greater
deed, to make be that which was not, than to seal it with an infinite
immortality: did God do that which was not worth doing? What he thought
worth making, you think not worth continuing made! You would have him go
on for ever creating new things with one hand, and annihilating those he
had made with the other--for I presume you would not prefer the earth to
be without animals! If it were harder for God to make the former go on
living, than to send forth new, then his creatures were no better than
the toys which a child makes, and destroys as he makes them. For what
good, for what divine purpose is the maker of the sparrow present at its
death, if he does not care what becomes of it? What is he there for, I
repeat, if he have no care that it go well with his bird in its dying,
that it be neither comfortless nor lost in the abyss? If his presence be
no good to the sparrow, are you very sure what good it will be to you
when your hour comes? Believe it is not by a little only that the heart
of the universe is tenderer, more loving, more just and fair, than yours
or mine.

If you did not believe you were yourself to out-live death, I could not
blame you for thinking all was over with the sparrow; but to believe in
immortality for yourself, and not care to believe in it for the sparrow,
would be simply hard-hearted and selfish. If it would make you happy to
think there was life beyond death for the sparrow as well as for
yourself, I would gladly help you at least to hope that there may be.

I know of no reason why I should not look for the animals to rise again,
in the same sense in which I hope myself to rise again--which is, to
reappear, clothed with another and better form of life than before. If
the Father will raise his children, why should he not also raise those
whom he has taught his little ones to love? Love is the one bond of the
universe, the heart of God, the life of his children: if animals can be
loved, they are loveable; if they can love, they are yet more plainly
loveable: love is eternal; how then should