BIRD, BEAST AND HUNTER. 23 



as to make it unsafe for them to undertake the projected 

 flight, without embarrassment to their comrades, and dispatch 

 them with their long sharp beaks, sending them as quickly 

 thumping to the earth, as if a rifle-ball had struck them to 

 the heart. Here is a necessitarian justice, coming out of the 

 code God himself has instituted for the government of his 

 natural world, which will no doubt greatly horrify the sickly 

 word-heroes of the anti-capital punishment and non-resistant 

 creeds. Although God himself has established these severe 

 ultimatums, there are those wiser than he, who would substi- 

 tute their own pale shadows of thought for the nervous sub- 

 stance of his will ! 



I do not deny progress, even in the fanatics' sense of it ; 

 but I assert that war has been one of its greatest physical 

 agents ; that it has convulsed and broken up those stagna- 

 tions of the moral sense which would have been fatal to it. 

 Though the necessity for war is gradually giving way to the 

 higher and more defined development of the spiritual life, 

 yet it must, for a long time yet, continue to be an important 

 agent of civilization. 



Do not let us, in the meantime, forget that the vocation of 

 the soldier and laborer is as honorable in God's sight, and as 

 necessary to the real progress of humanity, as that of the 

 intellectualist. And do not let us forget, either, that all 

 those associations of the past, which link our race more imme- 

 diately with these under types of passional life, are equally 

 glorious with that primeval time, when Ham, with the hirsute 

 strength, and passion for the chase, which gave birth from 

 him to the stalwart progeny of " mighty hunters before the 

 Lord," perpetuated those fierce instincts of combat and 

 destruction, which have made the gloom as well as the glory 

 of our progress. Brave times, certainly, were those of 



"Nimrod, the founder 



Of empire and chase, 

 Who made the woods wonder, 

 And quake for tibeir race ; 



