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 physica: 
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 their race; 
. 
