FROM THE BRUTE CREATION. 
511 
occurring; but such gift is generally accompanied by decreased 
instinctive powers. 
Again ; how beautiful is the display of parental affection in ani¬ 
mals ! with what assiduity and watchfulness will they tend their 
young !—yet on this most natural impulse has been placed the limi¬ 
tation of instinct. The parent and the offspring having performed 
their allotted task, the tie which held them together is not only 
loosened, but entirely severed : and why 'I —they have no lasting 
powers of association. 
Again; describe an animal, and you describe the species ; but 
in the human race all are different, having different gifts and 
powers, and actions, and tendencies, different in their form, figure, 
and expression. Are the flea, and 
“ Creation’s last and loveliest ones,” 
both, indeed, actuated by the same immaterial and eternal Spirit ? 
Does the worm who crawled over Shakspear’s “ tenement of clay” 
actually have the same glorious course of immortality to run as his 
godlike spirit which once dwelt therein ? 
Nor, in denying this blessed boon to animals, do we at all dero¬ 
gate from the goodness of their Creator. As He made them, as He 
willed they should continue, such a state has its happiness and its 
duration. But a future existence is incompatible with their pre¬ 
sent powers: they are not responsible—they are not far-seeing— 
they are not even suggestive. The butcher, sharpening his knife, 
does not startle the sheep with the suggestion that his is the throat 
to be cut. 
“ Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 
Pleas’d to the last, he crops the flowery food. 
And licks the hand just rais’d to take his blood.” 
The pistol, pointed at the head of the worn-out hunter, does not 
suggest to that animal that his master meditates his destruction: 
how, then, can it be said that they have within them the aspira¬ 
tions of the human soul, or the same longings after immortality? 
But these powers are not necessary to them, and were not included 
in the scheme of their creation; they have something seemingly 
above yet infinitely below such gifts. For, to use the language of 
one of the most gifted men of our own times—Lord Brougham— 
see how the Bee works, according to rules only discovered by 
man thousands of years after the insect had followed them with 
perfect accuracy. This little insect works with a truth and cor¬ 
rectness which arc (juite perfect, and according to the principles at 
which man has only arrived after ages of slow improvement in 
the most difficult l)raiicli of tlio most difficult science. But the 
