its object perish? Must the
very immortality of love divide the bond of love? Must the love live on
for ever without its object? or worse still, must the love die with its
object, and be eternal no more than it? What a mis-invented correlation
in which the one side was eternal, the other, where not yet annihilated,
constantly perishing! Is not our love to the animals a precious variety
of love? And if God gave the creatures to us, that a new phase of love
might be born in us toward another kind of life from the same fountain,
why should the new life be more perishing than the new love? Can you
imagine that, if, here-after, one of God's little ones were to ask him
to give again one of the earth's old loves--kitten, or pony, or
squirrel, or dog, which he had taken from him, the Father would say no?
If the thing was so good that God made it for and gave it to the child
at first who never asked for it, why should he not give it again to the
child who prays for it because the Father had made him love it? What a
child may ask for, the Father will keep ready.

That there are difficulties in the way of believing thus, I grant; that
there are impossibilities, I deny. Perhaps the first difficulty that
occurs is, the many forms of life which we cannot desire again to see.
But while we would gladly keep the perfected forms of the higher
animals, we may hope that those of many other kinds are as transitory as
their bodies, belonging but to a stage of development. All animal forms
tend to higher: why should not the individual, as well as the race, pass
through stages of ascent. If I have myself gone through each of the
typical forms of lower life on my way to the human--a supposition by
antenatal history rendered probable--and therefore may have passed
through any number of individual forms of life, I do not see why each of
the lower animals should not as well pass upward through a succession of
bettering embodiments. I grant that the theory requires another to
complement it; namely, that those men and women, who do not even
approximately fulfil the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not
endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving to ascend, are
sent away back down to that stage of development, say of fish or insect
or reptile, beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance. Who
has not seen or known men who _appeared_ not to have passed, or indeed
in some things to have approached the development of the mo