glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father almighty!  Thy universe is life, life and not death.  Even the death which awoke in the bosom of Sin, Thy Son, opposing Himself to its hate, and letting it spend its fury upon Him, hath abolished.  I know nothing, therefore care little, as to whether or not it may have pleased God to bring man up to the hill of humanity through the swamps and thickets of lower animal nature, but I do care that I should not now any more approach that level, whether once rightly my own or not.  For what is honor in the animals, would be dishonor in me.  Not the less may such be the punishment, perhaps redemption, in store for some men and women.  For aught I know, or see unworthy in the thought, the self-sufficing exquisite, for instance, may one day find himself chattering amongst fellow apes in some monkey-village of Africa or Burmah.  Nor is the supposition absurd, though at first sight it may well so appear.  Let us remember that we carry in us the characteristics of each and every animal.  There is not one fiercest passion, one movement of affection, one trait of animal economy, one quality either for praise or blame, existing in them that does not exist in us.  The relationship can not be so very distant.  And if theirs be so freely in us, why deny them so much we call ours?  Hear how one of the ablest doctors of the English church, John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s in the reign of James the first, writes:—­

  Man is a lump where all beasts kneaded be;
  Wisdom makes him an ark where all agree;
  The fool, in whom these beasts do live at jar,
  Is sport to others, and a theater;
  Nor scapes he so, but is himself their prey;
  All which was man in him, is eat away;
  And now his beasts on one another feed,
  Yet couple in anger, and new monsters breed. 
  How happy’s he which hath due place assigned
  To his beasts, and disaforested his mind! 
  Impaled himself to keep them out, not in;
  Can sow, and dares trust corn where they have been;
  Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,
  And is not ass himself to all the rest! 
  Else man not only is the herd of swine,
  But he’s those devils, too, which did incline
  Them to an headlong rage, and made them worse;
  For man can add weight to heaven’s heaviest curse.

“It astonishes me, friends, that we are not more terrified at ourselves.  Except the living Father have brought order, harmony, a world, out of His chaos, a man is but a cage of unclean beasts, with no one to rule them, however fine a gentleman he may think himself.  Even in this fair, well-ordered England of ours, at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, was discovered, some fifty years ago, a great cavern that had once been a nest of gigantic hyenas, evidenced by their own broken bones, and the crushed bones of tigers, elephants, bears, and many other creatures.  See to what a lovely peace the Creating Hand has even now brought our England, far as she is yet from being a province in the kingdom of Heaven; but see also in her former condition a type of the horror to which our souls may festering sink, if we shut out His free spirit, and have it no more moving upon the face of our waters.  And when I say a type, let us be assured there is no type worth the name which is not poor to express the glory or the horror it represents.