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.

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Whenever any trait of justice, or generosity, or far-sighted 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.

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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.

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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 hill-star’s nest in the air, or sling the hammock of the tiger-moth, 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 his care and love.  They have their mansions in the Father’s house, and we have ours; but the house is one, and the Master and keeper is one for us and them.