I have, at times, heard intelligent people express amazement that I should dare to place human life on an equal level with all other life, that I should so “blaspheme the Creator” as to say that the life in a two-legged animal who can talk is the same as that in a flower or a plant or a tree or some other animal which cannot talk. I have sometimes allowed myself to point out the innumerable advantages possessed over man by many living things which have no language, as we know language. I could fill a dozen volumes with word-pictures of the thousands and tens of thousands of advantages which living things outside of man possess over man, and which, if man could achieve, would be stupendous miracles. But man, collectively, is blinded by his egoism to the marvelous attainments of all life that does not walk and talk as he walks and talks. When confronted by the incontrovertible wonder and apparent miracle of other life as compared with his own I have nearly always found that men and women fall back, as a last resort, on the absurd and shallow argument: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul.” Once a beautiful young matron said to me, “There is much in your creed that is inspiring and beautiful, but it reaches a point where it is inconceivable, for you must concede that a human being is the most perfect of all created things.” I gave her an exquisite rose which I had plucked from my garden only a few minutes before. “There are, outside of men and women and children, innumerable things more perfectly created than this flower,” I said. “Are you, in your youth and beauty, as perfect as that rose?” * * * * * And yet I know that such arguments as these, innumerable though they might be, cannot prevail until men and women bring themselves face to face with nature itself, filled with a willingness and a yearning to understand. They point out the pests of life--the serpent, the deadly insects, the plants that scar and poison; yet they cannot see themselves as perhaps the deadliest and the most relentless of all pests. For it is one of the mysterious laws of Creation that every living thing--flower, and tree, and beast, and man--has a pest born unto it; and unto these pests other pests are born, until at last,--when the thing is analyzed,--a pest is a pest only in so far as its enemy, and not its friends, judge it to be a pest. If the world to-day were eliminated of human pests as each individual in the world might judge for himself, how many of us would be left alive to-morrow?