Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/659

Rh can not but regard as exceedingly commendable in Adam's firstborn.

"I do not remember," observed Mrs. Jameson, "ever to have heard the kind and just treatment of animals enforced on Christian principles or made the subject of a sermon." George Herbert was a man of gentle spirit and ready hand for the relief of all forms of human distress, and in his book entitled A Priest to the Temple, or the Country Parson, lays down rules and precepts for the guidance of the clergyman in all relations of life, even to the minutest circumstances and remotest contingencies incident to parochial care. But this tender-hearted man does not deem it necessary for the parson to take the slightest interest in animals, and does not utter a word of counsel as to the manner in which his parishioners should be taught their duties toward the creatures so wholly dependent upon them. Indeed, no treatise on pastoral theology ever touches this topic, nor is it ever made the theme of a discourse from the pulpit, or of systematic instruction in the Sunday school.

Neither the synagogue nor the church, neither sanhedrin nor ecclesiastical council, has ever regarded this subject as falling within its scope, and sought to inculcate as a dogma or to enforce by decree a proper consideration for the rights of the lower animals. One of the chief objections urged by Celsus more than seventeen centuries ago against Christianity was that it "considers everything as having been created solely for man." This stricture is indorsed by Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, who also animadverts on the evils growing out of the anthropocentric character of Christianity as a scheme of redemption and a system of theodicy. "It would seem," he says, "as if the primitive Christian, by laying so much stress upon a future life in contradistinction to this life, and placing the lower creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the same time out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in the light of our fellow-creatures. The definition of virtue among the early Christians was the same as Paley's—that it was good performed for the sake of insuring eternal happiness—which of course excluded all the so-called brute creatures. Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much-enduring, we know them to be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future, because they have no selfish, calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say 'a vicious horse,' why not say 'a virtuous horse'?"

We are ready enough, adds Dr. Arnold, to endow animals with our bad moral qualities, but grudge them the possession of our good ones. The Germans, whose natural and hereditary sympathy with the brute creation is stronger than that of any other