to befriend a little child, listening with the docility of a child to his driver's rebuke or exhortation. The light, airy, volatile bird seems to glow with a new instinct of affection and of perseverance under the shelter of the firm hand and eye of man. The dog, in all Eastern nations, even under the Old Testament itself, represented as an outcast, the emblem of all that was unclean and shameful, has, through the Gentile Western nations, been admitted within the pale of human fellowship. Truly, if man has thus, as it were, infused a soul into the dumb, lawless animals, what a community of feeling, what tenderness should it require from him in dealing with them. What a heartless, in one word, what an inhuman spirit is implied by any cruelty towards those, his dependents, his followers, his grateful, innocent companions, placed under his charge by Him who is at once their Father and ours. Remember our common origin and our common infirmities. Remember that we are bound to feel for their hunger, their thirst, their pains, which they share with us, and which we, the controllers of their destiny, ought to alleviate by the means which our advancing civilization enables us to use for ourselves. Remember how completely each of us is a god to them, and, as a god, bound to them by godlike duties.

DEAN STANLEY.

JUSTICE TO THE BRUTE CREATION.

The rights of all creatures are to be respected, but especially of those kinds which man domesticates and subsidizes for his peculiar use. Their nearer contact with the human world creates a claim on our loving-kindness beyond what is due to more foreign and untamed tribes.

Respect that claim. "The righteous man," says the

proverb, "regardeth the life of his beast." Note that word "righteous." The proverb does not say the merciful man, but the righteous, the just. Not mercy only, but justice, is due to the brute. Your horse, your ox, your kine, your dog, are not mere chattels, but sentient souls. They are not your own so proper as to make your will the true and only measure of their lot. Beware of contravening their nature's law, of taxing unduly their nature's strength. Their powers and gifts are a sacred trust. The gift of the horse is his fleetness, but when that gift is strained to excess and put to wager for exorbitant tasks, murderous injustice is done to the beast. They have their rights, which every right-minded owner will respect. We owe them return for the service they yield, all needful comfort, kind usage, rest in old age, and an easy death.

REV. DR. HEDGE.

CAN THEY SUFFER?

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of legs, or the villosity of the skin, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what could it avail? The question is not "Can they reason?" nor "Can they speak?" but "Can they

suffer?"

BENTHAM.

GROWTH OF HUMANE IDEAS.

The disposition to raise the fallen, to befriend the friendless, is now one of the governing powers of the world. Every year its dominion widens, and even now a strong and growing public opinion is enlisted in its support. Many men still spend lives that are merely selfish. But such lives are already regarded with general disapproval. The man on whom public opinion, anticipating the award of the highest tribunal, bestows its approbation, is the man who labors that he may leave other men better and happier than he found them. With the noblest spirits of our race this disposition to be useful grows into a passion. With an increasing number it is becoming at least an agreeable and interesting employment. On the monument to John Howard in St. Paul's, it is said that the man who devotes himself to the good of mankind treads " an 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 farsighted 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 dawn that beyond the negro there were other still humbler claimants for benevolence and justice. Within a few years, passed both the Emancipation of the West Indian slaves and the first act for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of which Lord Erskine so truly prophesied that it would prove not only an honor to the Parliament of England, but an era in the civilization of the world.

Miss F. P. COBBE.

NATURAL RIGHTS.

But what is needed for the present is due regard for the natural rights of animals, due sense of the fact that they are not created for man's pleasure and behoof alone, but have, independent of him, their own meaning and place in the universal order; that the God who gave them being, who out of the manifoldness of his creative thought let them pass into life, has not cast them off, but is with them, in them, still. A portion of his Spirit, though unconscious and unreflecting, is theirs. What else but the Spirit of God could guide the crane and the stork across pathless seas to their winter retreats, and back again to their summer haunts? What else could reveal to the petrel the coming storm? What but the Spirit of God could so geometrize the wondrous architecture of the spider and the bee, or hang the hillstar's nest in the air, or sling the hammock of the tigermoth, or curve the ramparts of the beaver's fort, and build the myriad "homes without hands" in which fish, bird, and insect make their abode? The Spirit of God is with them as with us, -consciously with us, unconsciously with them. We are not divided, but one in