as in the pangs of giving birth to a better self, a nobler world.  It is not necessary to the idea that the creation should know what it is groaning after, or wherein the higher condition constituting its deliverance must consist.  The human race groans for deliverance:  how much does the race know that its redemption lies in becoming one with the Father, and partaking of his glory?  Here and there one of the race knows it—­which is indeed a pledge for the race—­but the race cannot be said to know its own lack, or to have even a far-off notion of what alone can stay its groaning.  In like manner the whole creation is groaning after an unforeseen yet essential birth—­groans with the necessity of being freed from a state that is but a transitional and not a true one, from a condition that nowise answers to the intent in which existence began.  In both the lower creation and the higher, this same groaning of the fettered idea after a freer life, seems the first enforced decree of a holy fate, and itself the first movement of the hampered thing toward the liberty of another birth.

To believe that God made many of the lower creatures merely for prey, or to be the slaves of a slave, and writhe under the tyrannies of a cruel master who will not serve his own master; that he created and is creating an endless succession of them to reap little or no good of life but its cessation—­a doctrine held by some, and practically accepted by multitudes—­is to believe in a God who, so far as one portion at least of his creation is concerned, is a demon.  But a creative demon is an absurdity; and were such a creator possible, he would not be God, but must one day be found and destroyed by the real God.  Not the less the fact remains, that miserable suffering abounds among them, and that, even supposing God did not foresee how creation would turn out for them, the thing lies at his door.  He has besides made them so far dumb that they cannot move the hearts of the oppressors into whose hands he has given them, telling how hard they find the world, how sore their life in it.  The apostle takes up their case, and gives us material for an answer to such as blame God for their sad condition.

There are many, I suspect, who from the eighth chapter of St Paul’s epistle to the Romans, gather this much and no more:—­that the lower animals alive at the coming of the Lord, whensoever that may be, will thenceforward, with such as thereafter may come into existence, lead a happy life for the time allotted them!  Strong champions of God, these profound believers!  What lovers of life, what disciples of St Paul, nay, what disciples of Jesus, to whom such a gloss is consolation for the moans of a universe!  Truly, the furnace of affliction they would extinguish thus, casts out the more an evil odour!  For all the creatures who through ages of misery have groaned and travailed and died, to these mild Christians it is enough that they are dead, therefore, as they would argue, out of it now!