ARE ANIMALS IMMORTAL?

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 219, 20 October 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

ARE ANIMALS IMMORTAL?

By DR. FRANCIS 11. ROWLEY,

(President of the American Humane Education Society.) A soldier may love his horse intensely. It is killed in battle. He cannot bear to think that tffo noble animal has passed into complete oblivion, and that all the devotion it bore him passes into nothingness. Will he and his beloved horse ever meet again, or must they lvrnain for ever apart.-' This and, similar questions are being asked by animal lovers every day, ana it is the subject Dr. Rowley discusses in the following article. A NEW BROTHERHOOD. I have been asned to say a word upon our ethical relation to the animal world. Is there hope of Immortality for them? 'in the light of the latest conclusions of science, we are returning to an earlier and truer conception of the unity of a : ' life, and to a brotherhood wider than that which has been the theme of much of our Christian theoiogy. Washington Giadden remarked, yea:s ago, in an address to wiii'ch I listened, that this whole question of man's relation to the animal worid had, so far as he could learn, been leTt untouched by our writers on ethics." He declared he had searched in vain through all the book 3 on ethics in lus library for any recognition of the rights of the lower orders of life. Modern ethical science for the futuro surely gives larger consideration to this long-negiected Held of thought. The bond ot kinship befwe'en man and the other animals is too close and vital to draw a hard and fast line and say, He.-e the moral begins and the unmoral ends.

DEATH ONLY MEANS REMOVAL. So sane, scicntibc, and scholarly an author as Brierly writes: "The newdiscovered closer relation is forcing iteelf into our theology. It troubles it at all points. It ii a;o difficult ta dctino where animal ceases and man begins, why wonder at the difficulty of showing where man ends and God begins?" Men I ke Romanes shaded in thought? like these. That there is something in the creatures below us that death does not end has been the conviction of not a few of the world's great and good and wise. Such names as Luther, Wesley, Cowper, Southey, Shelley, Kehle, Kingsley : Doan Stanley, and Agassiz occur to one as among this number; even Plato 's included in them and Bishop Butler says: " Death removes them from viow. It destroys the sensible proof which we had of their being possessed of living powers, but does not appear to afford the least reason to beleve' that they are then or by that event depirved of thorn." To Darwin it was an "intolerable thought" that these creatures, with all their capacity of devotion, loyalty, and suffering, should suffer total annihilation at death.

SHALL WE MEET AGAIN? There are multitudes, as knowledge of life's mysteries slowly widens, to whom this thought is also "intollo - - able. " It is incredible to many wno have been the recipients, for example, of some dog's unfailing affoc'tion, that anything so akin to the love that is at the heart of the universe can bo blotted out. It is a part of the things that are best and that ought to pers'sc. The man or woman who has never associated intimately with these lowly friends will not understand it, cannot understand it. Dogs and horses no more than children open their hearts to those who do not love them.

UNIVERSAL KINSHIP. Think of what the following incident means to one who has studied and loved tlies orders of 1-fe below ua. Edgar Quinet says that on one occasion, when visiting the iions' cage in the Jardin des P/antes, iie observed tho lion gently place his large paw on the forehead of tho l'oness, and so they *c mained, gt'im and still, all tho time he was there. He ask id Geoffrey StamtHiillaire, who was with him, what t meant. "Their lion cub," was the answer, "died this morning." Personally, 1 must frankly say, n face of the misery, agony, the unrequited, patient toil, that make up *o much of tho lives ot my lowlier fellowcreatures, thta unless somehow, somewhere, i believed there was for these, my humble brethren in the universal kinship of life, a balancing ot the scales taht deal with the great realities cf right and wrong, my moral nature could never be at peace. \\ e work ami hope and trust in ti:e faith of Him who says:— That nothing walks with aimless feet ; That not one life shall be destroy d Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made t'ie' pila complete.