Here let me revert a moment, and say a little more clearly and strongly a thing I have already said:—­

When the apostle speaks of the whole creation, is it possible he should have dismissed the animals from his thoughts, to regard the trees and flowers bearing their part in the groaning and travailing of the sore burdened world?  Or could he, animals and trees and flowers forgotten, have intended by the creation that groaned and travailed, only the bulk of the earth, its mountains and valleys, plains and seas and rivers, its agglomeration of hard and soft, of hot and cold, of moist and dry?  If he could, then the portion that least can be supposed to feel or know, is regarded by the apostle of love as immeasurably more important than the portion that loves and moans and cries.  Nor is this all; for thereupon he attributes the suffering-faculty of the excluded, far more sentient portion at least, to the altogether inferior and less sentient, and upon the ground of that faculty builds the vision of its redemption!  If it could be so, then how should the seeming apostle’s affected rhapsody of hope be to us other than a mere puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, a special-pleading for nothing, as degrading to art as objectless in nature?

Much would I like to know clearly what animals the apostle saw on his travels, or around his home when he had one—­their conditions, and their relations to their superiors.  Anyhow they were often suffering creatures; and Paul was a man growing hourly in likeness to his maker and theirs, therefore overflowing with sympathy.  Perhaps as he wrote, there passed through his mind a throb of pity for the beasts he had to kill at Ephesus.

If the Lord said very little about animals, could he have done more for them than tell men that his father cared for them?  He has thereby wakened and is wakening in the hearts of men a seed his father planted.  It grows but slowly, yet has already borne a little precious fruit.  His loving friend St Francis has helped him, and many others have tried, and are now trying to help him:  whoever sows the seed of that seed the Father planted is helping the Son.  Our behaviour to the animals, our words concerning them, are seed, either good or bad, in the hearts of our children.  No one can tell to what the animals might not grow, even here on the old earth under the old heaven, if they were but dealt with according to their true position in regard to us.  They are, in sense very real and divine, our kindred.  If I call them our poor relations, it is to suggest that poor relations are often ill used.  Relatives, poor or rich, may be such ill behaved, self-assertive, disagreeable persons, that we cannot treat them as we gladly would; but our endeavour should be to develop every true relation.  He who is prejudiced against a relative because he is poor, is himself an ill-bred relative, and to be ill-bred is an excluding fault with the court of the high countries.  There, poverty is welcome, vulgarity inadmissible.