open but unfrequented path to immortality." The
remark, so true of Howard's time, is happily not true of ours.
MACKENZIE'S _Nineteenth Century._
* * * * *
MORAL LESSONS.
And let us take to ourselves the moral lessons which these creatures preach
to all who have studied and learned to love what I venture to call the
moral in brutes. Look at that faithful servant, the ox! What an emblem in
all generations of patient, plodding, meek endurance and serviceable toil!
Of the horse and the dog, what countless anecdotes declare the generous
loyalty, the tireless zeal, the inalienable love! No human devotion has
ever surpassed the recorded examples of brutes in that line. The story is
told of an Arab horse who, when his master was taken captive and bound hand
and foot, sought him out in the dark amidst other victims, seized him by
the girdle with his teeth, ran with him all night at the top of his speed,
conveyed him to his home, and then, exhausted with the effort, fell down
and died. Did ever man evince more devoted affection?
Surely, something of a moral nature is present also in the brute creation.
If nowhere else we may find it in the brute mother's care for her young.
Through universal nature throbs the divine pulse of the universal Love, and
binds all being to the Father-heart of the author and lover of all.
Therefore is sympathy with animated nature, a holy affection, an extended
humanity, a projection of the human heart by which we live, beyond the
precincts of the human house, into all the wards of the many creatured city
of God, as He with his wisdom and love is co-present to all. Sympathy with
nature is a part of the good man's religion.
REV. DR. HEDGE.
* * * * *
Whenever any trait of justice, or generosity, or far-sighted wisdom, or
wide tolerance, or compassion, or purity, is seen in any man or woman
throughout the whole human race, as in the fragments of a broken mirror we
see the reflection of the Divine image.
DEAN STANLEY.
* * * * *
DUTY TO ANIMALS NOT LONG RECOGNIZED.
It is not, however, to be reckoned as surprising, that our forefathers did
not dream of such a thing as Duty to Animals. They learned very slowly that
they owed duties to _men_ of other races than their own. Only in the
generation which recognized thoroughly for the first time that the negro
was a man and brother, did it daw
|