grow gray with fear?  Or let me grant what many professional men deny utterly, that some knowledge of what is called practical value to the race has been thus attained—­what can be its results at best but the adding of a cubit to the life?  Grant that it gave us an immortal earthly existence, one so happy that the most sensual would never wish for death:  what would it be by such means to live forever?  God in Heaven! who, what is the man who would dare live a life wrung from the agonies of tortured innocents?  Against the will of my Maker, live by means that are an abhorrence to His soul!  Such a life must be all in the flesh! the spirit could have little share therein.  Could it be even a life of the flesh that came of treason committed against essential animality?  It could be but an abnormal monstrous existence, that sprang, toadstool-like, from the blood-marsh of cruelty—­a life neither spiritual nor fleshey, but devilish.

“It is true we are above the creatures—­but not to keep them down; they are for our use and service, but neither to be trodden under the foot of pride, nor misused as ministers, at their worst cost of suffering, to our inordinate desires of ease.  After no such fashion did God give them to be our helpers in living.  To be tortured that we might gather ease! none but a devil could have made them for that!  When I see a man who professes to believe not only in a God, but such a God as holds His court in the person of Jesus Christ, assail with miserable cruelty the scanty, lovely, timorous lives of the helpless about him, it sets my soul aflame with such indignant wrath, with such a sense of horrible incongruity and wrong to every harmony of Nature, human and divine, that I have to make haste and rush to the feet of the Master, lest I should scorn and hate where He has told me to love.  Such a wretch, not content that Christ should have died to save men, will tear Christ’s living things into palpitating shreds, that he may discover from them how better to save the same men.  Is this to be in the world as He was in the world!  Picture to yourselves one of these Christian inquirers erect before his class of students:  knife in hand, he is demonstrating to them from the live animal, so fixed and screwed and wired that he cannot find for his agony even the poor relief of a yelp, how this or that writhing nerve or twitching muscle operates in the business of a life which his demonstration has turned from the gift of love into a poisoned curse; picture to yourself such a one so busied, suddenly raising his eyes and seeing the eyes that see him! the eyes of Him who, when He hung upon the cross, knew that He suffered for the whole creation of His Father, to lift it out of darkness into light, out of wallowing chaos into order and peace!  Those eyes watching him, that pierced hand soothing his victim, would not the knife fall from his hand in the divine paralysis that shoots from the heart and conscience?  Ah me! to have those eyes upon me in any wrong-doing!  One thing only could be worse—­not to have them upon me—­to be left with my devils.