ancestor!  Upon it, however, I do not care to spend thought or time, least of all argument; what I care to press is the question—­If we believe in the progress of creation as hitherto manifested, also in the marvellous changes of form that take place in every individual of certain classes, why should there be any difficulty in hoping that old lives may reappear in new forms?  The typical soul reappears in higher formal type; why may not also the individual soul reappear in higher form?

Multitudes evidently count it safest to hold by a dull scheme of things:  can it be because, like David in Browning’s poem Saul, they dread lest they should worst the Giver by inventing better gifts than his?  That we do not know, is the best reason for hoping to the full extent God has made possible to us.  If then we go wrong, it will be in the direction of the right, and with such aberration as will be easier to correct than what must come of refusing to imagine, and leaving the dullest traditional prepossessions to rule our hearts and minds, with no claim but the poverty of their expectation from the paternal riches.  Those that hope little cannot grow much.  To them the very glory of God must be a small thing, for their hope of it is so small as not to be worth rejoicing in.  That he is a faithful creator means nothing to them for far the larger portion of the creatures he has made!  Truly their notion of faithfulness is poor enough; how then can their faith be strong!  In the very nature of divine things, the common-place must be false.  The stupid, self-satisfied soul, which cannot know its own stupidity, and will not trouble itself either to understand or to imagine, is the farthest behind of all the backward children in God’s nursery.

As I say, then, I know no cause of reasonable difficulty in regard to the continued existence of the lower animals, except the present nature of some of them.  But what Christian will dare to say that God does not care about them?—­and he knows them as we cannot know them.  Great or small, they are his.  Great are all his results; small are all his beginnings.  That we have to send many of his creatures out of this phase of their life because of their hurtfulness in this phase of ours, is to me no stumbling-block.  The very fact that this has always had to be done, the long protracted combat of the race with such, and the constantly repeated though not invariable victory of the man, has had an essential and incalculable share in the development of humanity, which is the rendering of man capable of knowing God; and when their part to that end is no longer necessary, changed conditions may speedily so operate that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid.  The difficulty may go for nothing in view of the forces of that future with which this loving speculation concerns itself.

I would now lead my companion a little closer to what the apostle says in the nineteenth verse; to come closer, if we may, to the idea that burned in his heart when he wrote what we call the eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans.  Oh, how far ahead he seems, in his hope for the creation, of the footsore and halting brigade of Christians at present crossing the world!  He knew Christ, and could therefore look into the will of the Father.