Another difference between our age and all preceding ones, which specially touches this matter, is that in former times men thought so little of the lower animals that their lot scarcely entered as an item into calculation in the purview of the world. It was always the enigmas presented by _human_ inequalities, sufferings, and wrongs, which disturbed the doubter of old. His questions were, “Why do the wicked flourish like a green bay-tree? Why do the righteous perish, and none regardeth it? Why do the good and useful die in the flower of their years, and the evil live long in the land? Why, in short, is not that great _justice of heaven_ (in which man everywhere intuitively believes, though his intuition has assuredly never been evolved by experience), why is this not manifested in all the concerns of human beings?” The Book of Job posed the solemn question of this earlier doubt; and the Book of Revelation, by opening up to the gaze of men a heaven where the poor and the persecuted will be forever blessed and triumphant, afforded it a reply which, if far from complete, has yet practically sufficed to stay the faith of Christendom. By the fresh stress which Christianity laid on the doctrine of Immortality, and the different relative importance which it assigned to the earthly and to the heavenly life, it fulfilled, in a profounder sense, the boast of the English statesman. It “called up a New World to redress the balance of the Old.” The orthodox Catholic doctrine, that sin and suffering are necessarily permitted by the Creator to allow scope for moral freedom, may be made in a loose and general way to cover the larger difficulties presented by the condition of all _moral_ beings, for whose woes, if in any case unmerited, compensation is provided hereafter. So long, then, as the destiny of our own human race alone occupied any appreciable place in philosophy (and this was down to the earlier part of this century) there was not much room for Pessimism to find root among Western races. As to the brutes, few thought of their sufferings at all; and those who did so dismissed them with the doctrine that they shared the consequences of the Fall, which caused “the whole creation” to groan and “travail together in pain.” “These emmets, how little they are in our eyes! We tread them to dust, and a troop of them dies, Without our regard or concern,”