8 A BOOK OF MORTALS 



awakening of individual Life in order that it may in due 

 time sacrifice its individuality in Death and so bring new 

 life once more to the world. 



So much is certain, and beside this certainty the 

 question as to whether it be true or not true that out of 

 God's myriad creatures there are in His world to-day but 

 roughly speaking 1,500,000,000 legitimate heritors of a soul 

 fades into insignificance. 



And yet it forces on us the thought — If this be true, 

 how many are the beasts that perish ? 



He who marks the sparrow's fall can tell. None else. 



The limited mind of man loses its grip on numbers long 

 ere it can grapple with the mere outskirts of that vast mul- 

 titude of fellow-mortals indistinguishable in structure, even 

 to science, from man himself, which yet dies contentedly 

 that he may live, while numbers themselves stand powerless 

 before the myriads on myriads of lesser creatures each one of 

 whom has yet, in all its entirety, this marvellous gift of Life. 



Birth brings with it also another, and to the thoughtful 

 almost as mysterious a similarity, since neither instinct nor 

 reason gives us adequate cause for mother love. 



We worship this as divine in ourselves, we call it mere 

 instinct in the brute, yet neither our worship nor our con- 

 tempt brings us nearer a solution of the problem as to how 

 that passion of protection first arose which changes selfish- 

 ness to altruism even in that most selfish, most savage of all 

 beasts, the wolf. 



Neither do they take us further from the undoubted fact 

 that by self-forgetfulness, reckless self-sacrifice, the beast- 

 mother of to-day keeps this passion of protection at fiercer 

 heat than does the mother-of-men. 



