“The ignorance and pride which is forever sinking us toward them, are the very elements in us which mislead us in our judgment concerning them, causing us to imagine them not upon a lower merely, but upon an altogether different footing in creation from our own.  The same things we call by one name in us, and by another in them.  How jealous have not men been as to allowing them any share worthy the name of reason!  But you may see a greater difference in this respect between the lowest and the highest at a common school, than you will between them and us.  A pony that has taught itself without hands to pump water for its thirst, an elephant that puts forth its mighty lip to lift the moving wheel of the heavy wagon over the body of its fallen driver, has rather more to plead on the score of intellect than many a schoolboy.  Not a few of them shed tears.  A bishop, one of the foremost of our scholars, assured me that once he saw a certain animal laugh while playing off a practical joke on another of a different kind from himself.  I do not mention the kind of animal, because it would give occasion for a silly articulate joke, far inferior to his practical one.  I go further, and say, that I more than suspect a rudimentary conscience in every animal.  I care not how remotely rudimentary.  There must be in the moral world absolute and right potent germinal facts which lie infinitudes beyond the reach of any moral microscope, as in the natural world beyond the most powerful of lenses.  Yet surely in this respect also, one may see betwixt boys at the same school greater differences than there are betwixt the highest of the animals and the lowest of the humans.  If you plead for time for the boy to develop his poor rudimentary mollusk of a conscience, take it and heartily welcome—­but grant it the animals also.  With some of them it may need millions of years for any thing I know.  Certainly in many human beings it never comes plainly into our ken all the time they walk the earth.  Who shall say how far the vision of the apostle reached? but surely the hope in which he says God Himself subjected the creature to vanity, must have been an infinite hope:  I will hope infinitely.  That the Bible gives any ground for the general fancy that at death an animal ceases to exist, is but the merest dullest assumption.  Neither is there a single scientific argument, so far as I know, against the continued existence of the animals, which would not tell equally against human immortality.  My hope is, that in some way, concerning which I do not now choose to speculate, there may be progress, growth, for them also.  While I believe for myself, I must hope for them.  This much at least seems clear—­and I could press the argument further:  if not one of them is forgotten before God—­and one of them yet passes out of being—­then is God the God of the dead and not of the living!  But we praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks to Thee for Thy great