BREEDING OF HORSES. 71 



I would say, then, in the first place, that there is but one 

 way to approach this problem of breeding the horse. It is 

 the way in which we should approach the discussion of propa- 

 gating any form of life that has been made of God, and is inti- 

 mately connected with human happiness and the welfare of 

 society. The greatest coarseness that can be manifested by 

 a human being is the coarseness manifested in the presence of 

 a woman, and especially in the presence of a woman who is a 

 mother. A man who can derive anj^ element of joke, any 

 material for squibs, or the least substance for irreverential 

 remark, as he looks into the face of the mother as she holds 

 her child in her lap, or on her bosom, has stamped himself so 

 base, so ignoble, and so utterly rude, that he has ruled him- 

 self out of the presence of respectable and cleanly thinking 

 men. 



Whoever can approach the problem of propagating life so 

 that it may fulfil the high, and I may say, the serene uses 

 that the Creator intended it to fulfil ; whoever can look even 

 upon a young lamb in the farm-yard, and not see in its exist- 

 ence one of the divinest mysteries iu the universe ; whoever 

 can look into a nest of little robins, and see the care of the 

 old birds for their young, and not feel that he is touching the 

 margin of the greatest mystery we have to explore, is a 

 marvel of coarse insensibility, — and going up to the higher 

 forms of life, until we come next to the highest, perhaps, the 

 propagation of the horse, — for I place higher than the prop- 

 agation of the horse, the propagation of the dog, — Avhen he sees 

 what God intended in his creation, sees what he w^as designed 

 to be when God created him — for you know that all animal 

 forms existed first in some mood of God ; before ever they 

 had structure, they existed in his benevolent designs ; they 

 had an eternity of conception, as it were, in him, and they 

 truly have come out of him, as out of his own substance, — 

 whoever, then, comes up to a problem like this : How can we 

 reproduce the horse, in its old original type, and does not 

 feel grave and sober ; feel that he has touched one of the 

 gravest matters of studentship, he is, — I will not say what he 

 is, I will say what he is not, — he is not a sensitive and rever- 

 ential student of divine causes and effects. 



Now, young man, if I have arrived at any truth, if I have 



