is clearly intelligible and ably stated; the second is more of an implication, but both are based on the belief of man's special immortality; and, although divines are found[1] who are willing to extend the promise of a future life to the whole animal kingdom, and have discovered texts to advocate that view, the Hebrew Scriptures can scarcely be said to strongly support it. Even the poor untutored Todas of India, who are alone valued as an ethnological study, have at least a kinder and more sympathetic heart for their cattle. The sum of their belief is, that they were born—they and their cattle somehow rose out of the earth. When they die they go to Amnôr (the next world), which is a world exactly like this, whither their Buffaloes join them, to supply milk as in this state.[2] Sir Herbert Maxwell, in discussing our obligations to wild animals, states, as a "remarkable and perplexing fact, that neither the chosen people nor Christians are bound by their religion to pay the slightest regard to the feelings of animals. . . . There is not a word about mercy towards dumb animals in the Sermon on the Mount; not a word in all the writings of the Fathers (so far as known to me); not a word, apparently, from all the teachers of Christianity until we reach the dawn of rationalism in the eighteenth century, when an English country clergyman—the Rev. Mr. Grainger—scandalized his congregation and jeopardized his reputation for orthodoxy by preaching the duty of humane treatment of beasts and birds."[3] But if evolution is not a farce, and man has been derived from more lowly ancestors, then the possession of a soul—using the
- ↑ "Bishop Butler urges that every argument by which we maintain the immortality of man is of equal validity to maintain the immortality of the lower animals" (Canon Wilberforce).
- ↑ W.E. Marshall, 'A Phrenologist among the Todas,' p. 125.—It is a long flight from a Toda to an Agassiz, but we may quote the opinion of that eminent and not undevout zoologist:—"Most of the arguments of philosophy in favour of the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings. May I not add that a future life in which man would be deprived of that great source of enjoyment and intellectual and moral improvement which result from the contemplation of the harmonies of the organic world would involve a lamentable loss; and may we not look to a spiritual concert of the combined worlds and all their inhabitants in presence of their Creator as the highest conception of paradise?" ('An Essay on Classification,' p. 99).
- ↑ 'Blackwood's Magazine,' August, 1899, p. 228.
