656 
AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE EXISTENCE 
M Whilst the poor dog, in life the firmest friend, 
The first to welcome, foremost to defend, 
Whose honest heart is still his master’s own, 
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone, 
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth, 
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth.” 
But if, indeed, the beasts do perish, that very circumstance ought 
to produce greater kindness towards them. Man may .persecute 
his fellow-man, but hope will still lie in the bitter cup, and visions 
of brighter times will illumine his present misery ; but what coun- 
terbalance to their sufferings have the poor brutes? “Theirs,” 
says the eloquent Chalmers, “is unmixed and unmitigated pain; 
the agonies of martyrdom, without the alleviation of the hopes and 
the sentiments whereof they are incapable. When they lie them 
down to die, their only fellowship is with suffering, for, in the 
prison-house of their beset and bounded faculties, there can no 
relief be afforded by communion with other interests or other 
things. The attention does not lighten their distress as it does that 
of man, by carrying off his spirit from that existing pungency and 
pressure which might else be overwhelming. There is but room 
in their mysterious economy for one inmate, and that is the absorb- 
ing sense of their own single and concentrated anguish. And so 
in that bed of torment, whereon the wounded animal lingers and 
expires, there is an unexplored depth and intensity of suffering, 
which the poor dumb animal itself cannot tell, and against which it 
can offer no remonstrance — an untold and unknown amount of 
wretchedness, of which no articulate voice gives utterance. But 
there is an eloquence in its silence, and the very shroud which 
disguises it only serves to aggravate its horrors.” 
Des Cartes and his followers may be proud of proving, as they 
imagine, that the lower animals are mere machines without 
sensation, and just so constructed as to give forth all the natural 
signs and expressions of it; and they may suppose, by thus low- 
ering them, that they exalt themselves in the scale of animated 
existence. But they proceed on false premises, in supposing that 
they exalt their reason and dignity by degrading animals ; for, al- 
lowing their own superiority, the more highly animals are exalted, 
the higher too must be that superiority, as a ruler of a civilized 
people holds a more honourable station than a ruler among sa- 
vages. 
The Great Maker of All has delegated to man a portion of his 
authority ; but he has not withdrawn his watchful care from one 
of his creatures. His care extends to the smallest creature alive. 
“ The beasts of the field cry unto thee,” says the Prophet, “ and 
