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"Some great cause, God's new Messiah"

MESSIAH PULPIT

NEW YORK

(Being a continuation of Unity Pulpit, Boston)

Entered at the Post-office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter.

This is thy brother, this poor silver fish,
Close to the surface, dying in his dish;
Thy flesh, thy beating heart, thy very life;
All this, I say, thou art, against thy wish.

Thou mayst not turn away, thou shalt allow
The truth, nor shalt thou dare to question how;
There is but one great heart in nature beating,
And this is thy heart, this, I say, art thou.

In all thy power and all thy pettiness,
With this and that poor selfish purpose, this
And that high-climbing fancy, and a heart
Caught into heaven or cast in the abyss,-

Thou art the same with all the little earth,
A little part; and sympathy of birth
Shall tell thee, and thine openness of soul,
What fear is death and what a life is worth.

P. H. SAVAGE.

OUR POOR RELATIONS, THE

ANIMALS.

I HAVE chosen four or five different passages as texts, because I wish you to get in mind the range of expression contained in the Bible on this subject.

First, I call your attention, without quoting them, to the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth verses of the first chapter of Genesis in connection and contrast with the twenty-seventh verse. It is where God is represented as having created all the living things below the human, and then, in quite a different way, as having created

man.

Then in the twenty-fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, at the fourth verse, you will find the words, "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn."

In the twelfth chapter of the Book of Proverbs the tenth verse reads as follows: "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."

In the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew the twenty-ninth and thirtieth verses read as follows: "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father: the very hairs of your head are numbered.”

And then, for the last verse, in the ninth chapter of the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, Paul quotes and comments on the verse which I read from Deuteronomy: "For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.

Is it for the oxen that God careth, or saith he it altogether for our sake? Yea, for our sake it was written."

If we go far enough back in the history of the world, we come to a time when the chronic relation between man and the animal world was one of warfare. It was necessarily so; but, unfortunately, this condition has left inherited traces which are not yet outgrown.

Note the conditions. When men first emerged from the purely animal condition, they were the weakest creatures, almost, on the face of the earth. The human child still is the weakest of all the young that begin their career on this planet.

Men had no natural weapons of the ordinary kind with which to fight against their enemies, the animals. For you must remember that the animals were enemies, rivals. They occupied the ground; and, if men were to have any peaceful habitation, they must clear it of these animals or bring them in some way under control.

And man had no natural weapons. He was not as strong as a good many other animals. He was not as fleet of foot as other animals. He had no horns nor hoofs nor poisonous sting with which to defend himself.

Where did his strength, then, lie? It was in just that peculiarity which has made him, as the years have gone by, the master of the world. He had a certain added brain power, so that he was wiser than they. He could outwit—that is, out-know-his rivals and his enemies.

And there was a physical peculiarity. He not only began to stand upon his feet; but this wonderful factdid you ever think of it?—that the thumb is opposed to the four fingers in men, and that so they are able to grasp, was apparent. They had hands. They had hands. And with these hands they could tear off a limb from a tree and use it as a cudgel; and with this brain power they could think out various devices; they could chip the flint, and so come into possession of knives or spear-heads. They

could go on discovering and making various kinds of weapons with which to protect themselves.

But for a long period of time men veritably fought for their lives with the other animals; and the world has not yet, curiously enough, outgrown that condition.

Before coming to the present time, however, let me ask you to note something of strange significance in the Bible. I wonder how many of you ever noticed it? When the conquest of Canaan was going on, the Israelites are told not to destroy their enemies, the previous possessors of the land, too rapidly, lest the wild beasts increase in such numbers as to threaten their very existence. You see the strenuousness of the warfare in so modern a time as that.

But it is going on to-day. Every year in India there are hundreds of thousands of men and women and children who lose their lives. The tigers, the serpents, the different wild beasts of the jungle, are continually preying upon them. So that men have had to fight the animals in order that they might live.

And out of this necessity there have grown up certain inherited feelings of antagonism that we need to-day to outgrow and leave behind.

I wish you to note another strange phase of human development. I suppose every nation in the world has passed through this phase. You do not have to go back so very far to find it. We find it to-day in our story books, particularly those that the children enjoy. In these books the animals think, can talk, converse with each other and with men. There is a tribe of people of whom I have read-I do not this moment recall its name-who to-day tell us that the monkeys might talk if they only would, but that they keep still through fear that they might be set to work if they showed too much intelligence.

We do not have to go back too far before we find a