“_If_ they perish,” the Doctor, used always reverently to say when he talked upon this subject. Oh Reader, it would have done you good as it has done me, if you had heard him speak upon it, in his own beautiful old age! “_If_ they perish,” he would say. “That the beasts die without hope we may conclude; death being to them like falling asleep, an act of which the mind is not cognizant! But that they live without religion, he would not say,—that they might not have some sense of it according to their kind; nor that all things animate, and seemingly inanimate did not actually praise the Lord, as they are called upon to do by the Psalmist, and in the _Benedicite_!” It is a pious fancy of the good old lexicographist Adam Littleton that our Lord took up his first lodging in a stable amongst the cattle, as if he had come to be the Saviour of them as well as of men; being by one perfect oblation of himself, to put an end to all other sacrifices, as well as to take away sins. This, he adds the Psalmist fears not to affirm speaking of God's mercy. “Thou savest,” says he, “both man and beast.” The text may lead us further than Adam Littleton's interpretation. “_Qu'on ne me parle plus de_ NATURE MORTE, says M. de Custine, in his youth and enthusiasm, writing from Mont-Auvert; _on sent ici que la Divinité est partout, et que les pierres sont pénétrées comme nous-mêmes d'une puissance créatrice! Quand on me dit que les rochers sont insensibles, je crois entendre un enfant soutenir que l'aiguille d'une montre ne marche pas, parce qu'il ne la voit pas se mouvoir._” Do not, said our Philosopher, when he threw out a thought like this, do not ask me how this can be! I guess at every thing, and can account for nothing. It is more comprehensible to me that stocks and stones should have a sense of devotion, than that men should be without it. I could much more easily persuade myself that the birds in the air, and the beasts in the field have souls to be saved, than I can believe that very many of my fellow bipeds have any more soul than, as some of our divines have said, serves to keep their bodies from putrefaction. “God forgive me, worm that I am! for the sinful thought of which I am too often conscious,—that of the greater part of the human race, the souls are not worth saving!”—I have not forgotten the look which accompanied these words, and the tone in which he uttered them, dropping his voice toward the close.