“To return to the animals:  they are a care to God! they occupy part of His thoughts; we have duties toward them, owe them friendliness, tenderness.  That God should see us use them as we do is a terrible fact—­a severe difficulty to faith.  For to such a pass has the worship of Knowledge—­an idol vile even as Mammon himself, and more cruel—­arrived, that its priests, men kind as other men to their own children, kind to the animals of their household, kind even to some of the wild animals, men who will scatter crumbs to the robins in winter, and set water for the sparrows on their house-top in summer, will yet, in the worship of this their idol, in their greed after the hidden things of the life of the flesh, without scruple, confessedly without compunction, will, I say, dead to the natural motions of the divine element in them, the inherited pity of God, subject innocent, helpless, appealing, dumb souls to such tortures whose bare description would justly set me forth to the blame of cruelty toward those who sat listening to the same.  Have these living, moving, seeing, hearing, feeling creatures, who could not be but by the will and the presence of Another any more than ourselves—­have they no rights in this their compelled existence?  Does the most earnest worship of an idol excuse robbery with violence extreme to obtain the sacrifices he loves?  Does the value of the thing that may be found there justify me in breaking into the house of another’s life?  Does his ignorance of the existence of that which I seek alter the case?  Can it be right to water the tree of knowledge with blood, and stir its boughs with the gusts of bitter agony, that we may force its flowers into blossom before their time?  Sweetly human must be the delights of knowledge so gained! grand in themselves, and ennobling in their tendencies!  Will it justify the same as a noble, a laudable, a worshipful endeavor to cover it with the reason or pretext—­God knows which—­of such love for my own human kind as strengthens me to the most ruthless torture of their poorer relations, whose little treasure I would tear from them that it may teach me how to add to their wealth?  May my God give me grace to prefer a hundred deaths to a life gained by the suffering of one simplest creature.  He holds his life as I hold mine by finding himself there where I find myself.  Shall I quiet my heart with the throbs of another heart? soothe my nerves with the agonized tension of a system? live a few days longer by a century of shrieking deaths?  It were a hellish wrong, a selfish, hateful, violent injustice.  An evil life it were that I gained or held by such foul means!  How could I even attempt to justify the injury, save on the plea that I am already better and more valuable than he; that I am the stronger; that the possession of all the pleasures of human intelligence gives me the right to turn the poor innocent joys of his senses into pains before which, threatening my own person, my very soul would