Is not this the best of promised lands, the kindest of Elysiums, which leaves none out in the cold of cruelty and hatred? The importunate questioner may inquire, How can this primal and ultimate happiness compensate for the intervening ages of pain? About this, it may be observed that in religious matters people ought not to want to know too much. This is true of the faithful and even of the unfaithful. Scientific researches in the great storehouse which contains the religions of the world are more aided by a certain reserve, a certain reverence, than by the insatiable curiosity of the scalpel. Religions sow abroad _idées mères_; they tell some things, others they leave untold. They take us up into an Alpine height whence we see the broad configuration of the country and lose sight of the woods and the tortuous ravines among which we so often missed the track. Now, from the Alpine height of faith, the idea of an original and final Nature Peace makes the intervening discord seem of no account—a false note between two harmonies. The Nature Peace as the emblem of perfect moral beauty became nearly the first Christian idea carried out in art. I remarked a rude but striking instance of it on one of the funereal monuments which have been found lately at Carthage, belonging to a date when Christian and pagan commemorated their dead in the same manner, the former generally only adding some slight symbolical indication of his faith. In this stele Christ, carrying the lamb across His shoulders, is attended by a panther and a lion. All such primitive attempts to represent a Nature Peace are chiefly interesting (and from this point of view their interest is great) from the fact that in child-like, stammering efforts they reveal the intrinsic idiosyncrasy of Christian thought after the Church had parted from the realities of proximity with its Founder, and had not reached the realities of a body corporate striving for supremacy. Christ the Divine Effluence was the faith which made men willing to face the lions. Doubtless many of those martyrs clung to the sublime conception of a final Peace, the complement of the first. That this was accepted as no allegory by the later spiritualised Jews, and especially by the Pharisees, seems to be a well-established fact. It is difficult to interpret in any other way the solemn statement of St. Paul, that the “whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together _until now_,” waiting for redemption; or the beatific vision of Josephus: “The whole Creation also will lift up a perpetual hymn ... and shall praise Him that made them together with the angels and spirits and men, now freed from all bondage.” _Homines et jumenta salvabis Domine._ II. What was the view taken of animals by the Jewish people, apart from the fundamental ideas implied by a primordial Peace in Nature?