of love?  Must the love live on for ever without its object? or worse still, must the love die with its object, and be eternal no more than it?  What a mis-invented correlation in which the one side was eternal, the other, where not yet annihilated, constantly perishing!  Is not our love to the animals a precious variety of love?  And if God gave the creatures to us, that a new phase of love might be born in us toward another kind of life from the same fountain, why should the new life be more perishing than the new love?  Can you imagine that, if, here-after, one of God’s little ones were to ask him to give again one of the earth’s old loves—­kitten, or pony, or squirrel, or dog, which he had taken from him, the Father would say no?  If the thing was so good that God made it for and gave it to the child at first who never asked for it, why should he not give it again to the child who prays for it because the Father had made him love it?  What a child may ask for, the Father will keep ready.

That there are difficulties in the way of believing thus, I grant; that there are impossibilities, I deny.  Perhaps the first difficulty that occurs is, the many forms of life which we cannot desire again to see.  But while we would gladly keep the perfected forms of the higher animals, we may hope that those of many other kinds are as transitory as their bodies, belonging but to a stage of development.  All animal forms tend to higher:  why should not the individual, as well as the race, pass through stages of ascent.  If I have myself gone through each of the typical forms of lower life on my way to the human—­a supposition by antenatal history rendered probable—­and therefore may have passed through any number of individual forms of life, I do not see why each of the lower animals should not as well pass upward through a succession of bettering embodiments.  I grant that the theory requires another to complement it; namely, that those men and women, who do not even approximately fulfil the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving to ascend, are sent away back down to that stage of development, say of fish or insect or reptile, beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance.  Who has not seen or known men who appeared not to have passed, or indeed in some things to have approached the development of the more human of the lower animals!  Let those take care who look contemptuously upon the animals, lest, in misusing one of them, they misuse some ancestor of their own, sent back, as the one mercy for him, to reassume far past forms and conditions—­far past in physical, that is, but not in moral development—­and so have another opportunity of passing the self-constituted barrier.  The suggestion may appear very ridiculous, and no doubt lends itself to humorous comment; but what if it should be true! what if the amused reader should himself be getting ready to follow the remanded