Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of CreationPridham, Caroline
Religion
Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of Creation
Pridham, Caroline
Creation -- Juvenile literature
To all the "higher animals" God has given both heart and brain. He has
also given them, in more or less degree, that mysterious sense of which we
have spoken before, and of which we have had so many proofs; a sense which
is not at all dependent upon reason or intellect, but is found in a less
degree in men than in animals to which reason has not been given.
We have before noticed that by instinct and memory all the wants of the
brute creation are met; God has given them all that they need to teach them
to live, each in its own life, after its kind, and to provide for their
young ones; but He has not given to the "beasts that perish" the power of,
as we sometimes say, "putting this and that together," nor, as far as we
know, of learning by experience; although it does seem as if the spiders,
in making their webs, improve by practice.
Instinct teaches every living thing to get its own food, choosing that
which is suited to itself, and rejecting that which is not. It teaches the
bird or the insect to seek out a fit place in which to deposit its eggs, or
to make a nest or "homie" for them, even before they are laid; and it can
teach even such a free creature as a bird to leave for a time its airy
life, and to sit patiently upon its eggs, even carefully turning them, as
if it knew that the life of the unfledged nursling within the shell-wall
depended upon its being kept warm.
Instinct leads the butterfly, as we have seen, to lay its eggs upon the
leaf of the very tree upon which the caterpillar, when hatched, will
feed--though its own food has been taken from flowers.
Instinct guides the swallow in its flight, as it leaves us in the autumn
for the shores of Africa; and the redwing on its way from its summer home
in the far North to winter in our warmer country--each arriving in its
appointed season.
[Illustration: THE SWALLOW.]
And so, as we study the habits of birds and beasts, we see how instinct
everywhere guides and directs them; but what this sense _is_ we cannot
tell. It has been well remarked, that all that can rightly be said of it
is, that it is "a guide which God, in His care for His creatures, has given
them, and caused them to obey."
We also noticed in reading these verses that until man was formed, there
was no lord over the Creation, but that to Adam God gave dominion over all;
nothing was expected, and he was owned as head, God Himself bringing the
creatures to him that they might receive their names from him, though Adam
himself was still under God, and every benefit with which the Creator
loaded him, only left him so much more bound to own His right over him.
As God has made us for Himself, He has given to every man, even the rudest
savage, something within him which reminds him of One to whom he of right
belongs; however far he may have got away from Him, or may have tried to
satisfy his conscience--that "eye of the soul"--by seeking to please some
idol-god which he has made for himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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