For those who, whether they believe in evolution or not, still hold faith in the existence of a divine Lord of man and brute, the reasons for sympathy are, in another way, still stronger. That the Christian religion did not, from the first, like the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Brahminist, impress its followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes; that it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, like St. Francis, to connect the creatures in any way with the worship of the Creator, and to the later development of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine on the subject of duty toward them,--is a paradox which would need much space to explain. Modern religion, at all events, by whatever name it is called, seems tending more and more to throw an additional tender sacredness over our relations to the “unoffending creatures which he,” their Maker, “loves,” and to make us recognize a latent truth in the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concerning him who “prayeth best” and also loveth best “both man and bird and beast.” Where that great and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our own failures and offences, is vividly present, the position we hold to creatures who _have never done wrong_ is always found inexpressibly touching. To be kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-like part in our little sphere, and display the mercy for which we hope in our turn. Whichever way we take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion. The only befitting feeling for human beings to entertain toward brutes is, as the very word suggests, the feeling of _humanity_: or, as we may interpret it, the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can cultivate fellow-feeling; of pity, so far as we know them to suffer; of mercy, so far as we can spare their sufferings; of kindness and benevolence, so far as it is in our power to make them happy. There is nothing fanatical about this humanity. It does not call on us to renounce any of the useful or needful avocations of life as regards animals, but rather would it make the man imbued with it perform them all the better.[25] We assuredly need not, because we become humane, sacrifice the higher life for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist parable so beautifully rendered in the _Light of Asia_, where “Lord Buddha,” in one of his million lives, gives himself, out of pity, to be devoured by a famishing tiger who cannot feed her cubs, and “The great cat’s burning breath Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love.” We need not even copy the sweet lady in the “Sensitive Plant” who made the bees and moths and ephemeridæ her attendants:-- “But all killing insects and gnawing worms, And things of obscene and unlovely forms, She bore in a basket of Indian woof Into the rough woods far aloof,--