“There is no selfish and exclusive salvation. Man merits his salvation only _through the salvation of all_. The animals below us have also their rights before God. ‘Animal life, sombre mystery! Immense world of thoughts and of dumb sufferings! But signs too visible, in default of language, express those sufferings. All Nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.’ This sentence, which I wrote in 1846, has recurred to me very often. This year (1863), in October, near a solitary sea, in the last hours of the night, when the wind, the wave were hushed in silence, I heard the voices of our humble domestics. From the basement of the house, and from the obscure depths, these voices of captivity, feeble and plaintive, reached me and penetrated me with melancholy--an impression of no vague sensibility, but a serious and positive one. “The further we advance in knowledge, the more we apprehend the true meaning of realities, the more do we understand simple but very serious matters which the hurry (_entraînement_) of life makes us neglect. Life! Death! The daily murder, which feeding upon other animals implies--those hard and bitter problems sternly placed themselves before my mind. Miserable contradiction! Let us hope that there may be another globe in which the base, the cruel fatalities of this may be spared to us.”[256] Extolling the greater respect of the Hindus for other life, as exhibited in their sacred scriptures, Michelet vindicates the pre-eminently beneficent character of the Cow, in Europe so ungratefully treated by the recipients of her bounty:-- “Let us name first, with honour, his beneficent nurse--so honoured and beloved by him--the sacred Cow, who furnished the happy nourishment--favourable intermediate between insufficient herbs and flesh, which excites horror. The Cow, whose milk and butter has been so long the sacred offering. She alone supported the primitive people in the long journey from Bactria to India. By her, in face of so many ruins and desolations--by this fruitful nurse, who unceasingly renovates the earth for him, he has lived and always lives.”[257] In his _Bird_ he constantly preaches the faith that can remove mountains--the faith that regards the regeneration and pacification of earth as the proper destiny of our species:--