Future Life. 48 1 



Cowperinhis "Task," makes allusion to this branch of 

 our subject in the following lines : 



" Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, 

 But God will never. When He charged the Jew 

 To assist his foe's down-fallen beast to rise ; 

 And when the bush-exploring boy, that seized 

 The young, to let the parent-bird go free ; 

 Proved He not plainly that His meaner works, 

 Are yet His care, and have an interest all 

 All in the universal Father's love ? " 



One passage there is which certainly does point to a future 

 for the beast as well as for man, and which places them both 

 on the very same plane. It is found in Genesis, ninth chap- 

 ter and fifth verse, and constitutes a part of the law 

 which was delivered to Noah, and which was subsequently 

 incorporated in the fuller law given through Moses. " And 

 surely your blood of your lives will I require," said God to 

 Noah and his sons, " at the hand of every beast will I 

 require it, and at the hand of every man ; at the hand of 

 every man's brother will I require the life of man." In 

 Exodus, chapter twenty-one and twenty-eighth verse, we 

 read, " If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die : then 

 the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be 

 eaten ; but the owner of the ox shall be quit." 



While there are no passages of Scripture, as has been 

 seen, which deny immortality of life to the lower animals, 

 yet there are certainly some which tend to show it by infer- 

 ence. But the Scriptures were written for human beings, 

 and not for the lower animals, and therefore it could hardly 

 be expected that any information could be gained therefrom 

 on the subject. As we find so few direct references to the 

 future state of man, it is not at all to be expected that we 

 should receive direct instruction upon the after-life of the 

 beast. 



But just as man has had within himself for untold ages an 

 intuitive witness to his own immortality, yet there are those, 



