Future Life. 481 
Cowper in his “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, 
