‘It is well with them,’ I seem to hear such say; ’they are mercifully dealt with; their sufferings are over; they had not to live on for ever in oppression.  The God of their life has taken from them their past, and troubles them with no future!’ It is true this were no small consolation concerning such as are gone away!  Surely rest is better than ceaseless toil and pain!  But what shall we say of such a heedless God as those Christians are content to worship!  Is he a merciful God?  Is he a loving God?  How shall he die to escape the remorse of the authorship of so much misery?  Our pity turns from the dead creature to the live creator who could live and know himself the maker of so many extinguished hearts, whose friend was—­not he, but Death.  Blessed be the name of the Father of Jesus, there is no such creator!

Be we have not to do with the dead only; there are those which live and suffer:  is there no comfort concerning them, but that they too shall at length die and leave their misery?  And what shall we say of those coming, and yet to come and pass—­evermore issuing from the fountain of life, daily born into evil things?  Will the consolation that they will soon die, suffice for the heart of the child who laments over his dead bird or rabbit, and would fain love that father in heaven who keeps on making the creatures?  Alas, they are crowding in; they cannot help themselves; their misery is awaiting them!  Would those Christians have me believe in a God who differentiates creatures from himself, only that they may be the prey of other creatures, or spend a few hours or years, helpless and lonely, speechless and without appeal, in merciless hands, then pass away into nothingness?  I will not; in the name of Jesus, I will not.  Had he not known something better, would he have said what he did about the father of men and the sparrows?

What many men call their beliefs, are but the prejudices they happen to have picked up:  why should such believers waste a thought as to how their paltry fellow-inhabitants of the planet fare?  Many indeed have all their lives been too busy making their human fellows groan and sweat for their own fancied well-being, to spare a thought for the fate of the yet more helpless.  But there are not a few, who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining him better than he is:  whether is it he or themselves they dread injuring by expecting too much of him?  ’You see the plain facts of the case!’ they say.  ’There is no questioning them!  What can be done for the poor things—­except indeed you take the absurd notion into your head, that they too have a life beyond the grave?’

Why should such a notion seem to you absurd?  I answer.  The teachers of the nation have unwittingly, it seems to me through unbelief, wronged the animals deeply by their silence anent the thoughtless popular presumption that they have no hereafter; thus leaving them deprived of a great advantage to their position among men.  But I suppose they too have taken it for granted that the Preserver of man and beast never had a thought of keeping one beast alive beyond a certain time; in which case heartless men might well argue he did not care how they wronged them, for he meant them no redress.  Their immortality is no new faith with me, but as old as my childhood.