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Ye feathered tribes,

Sing unmolested in your leafy bowers;
Ye finny nations, in your streams and lakes
And pearly grottos play; ye insect swarms,
Murmur melodious; turn your burnished wings
Bright-twinkling to the sun; at morn and eve,
With all your sportive myriads in the air,
Reel through the mazy dance-for in your mirth
My soul participates. Around your cliffs,
In many a playful curve, ye sea-birds, wheel;
Preen your gray wings;-along the level brine
Quick-diving plunge; or on the sunny swell
Float like smalli slets of embodied foam;
Stars of the sea, ye stud and beautify
Its azure waste, as th' empyrean fires
Gem and illume the ebon vault of night.
Who would not deem it an offence to heaven
To harm your joys, or from one little nook,
Their heritage from God, your wingless brood
Cruel dislodge? With man from God ye spring,
Are God's dependents-ratified as his

Your rights to share the bounty Nature gives,
Sport in the waves, or on your native rocks

To congregate and clamour as ye will.

Ye too perchance, as particles detached

From mind's pure essence, thro' full many a grade
Of still improving being, may advance

To life celestial. Shame pursue the wretch

That in your carnage finds a dire delight!

May heaven forfend he e'er should wield the sword,
Or turn his ire on man! Beneath my roof

O let him come not! Never may we ride

In skiff or car together! May he ne'er

See my lov'd rocks, nor with his hideous sight

Blast the pure air through which ye wing your way.
W. H. D.'s Pleasures of Benevolence.

The schoolmaster may ably second the benevolent designs of the parent: and he must have frequent opportunities of inculcating precepts of sympathy for the feathered creation, particularly in the season of nests. It may be profitable for his pupils to have their sensibility touched, and to contemplate, that they may avoid, the odious character of the truant and idler, that "would rob a poor bird of her young."

"The most ungentle of the tribe was he,

No generous precept ever touched his heart;
With concord false, and hideous prosody,

He scrawled his task and blundered o'er his part.

"On mischief bent, he marked with rav'nous eyes,
Where wrapt in down the callous songsters lay,
Then rushing rudely seized the glittering prize,
And bore it in his impious hands away."

The clergy, too, should act as auxiliaries in this good work. The influence derived from their office cannot be better employed, either in public or private, than in pre

venting cruelty, and teaching their friends and auditors to be humane. Divines often expatiate on the value of a human soul, and declare that the whole solar system is of less estimation. It is true indeed, inert matter is of value only in its relation to animated beings; and this consideration should induce them to extend the idea to all living creatures, even to the lowest species; as many parts of the inanimate world have evidently been constructed with a view to their peculiar habits and instincts.

Many years ago, a Presbyterian minister in the north of Ireland, desirous of putting a stop to cock-fighting, a barbarous custom to which the people of his parish were addicted, particularly at the season of Easter, requested their attendance to hear a discourse on a very interesting subject. The congregation, of course, was crowded. He chose for his text that passage of Matthew or Luke which describes Peter as weeping bitterly when he heard the cock crow; and discoursed upon it with such eloquence and pathos, and made so judicious an application of the subject, that his hearers from that day forth abandoned the unchristian practice. Of how much good was this single discourse productive? How much ribaldry, blasphemy, ebriety, gambling, and all such vices as are commonly associated with cock-fighting, did it serve to abolish? Will any one say that this minister went out of his province in expatiating on such a theme? or that he was not preaching Christ, when he was putting down a vice so opposed to Christianity? He might have declaimed for years on speculative points of faith, without any result. The best preacher of Christ is he who by his discourses best promotes the practice of the Christian virtues. Would that such a laudable example were more generally followed-that no minister of the gospel would cease to denounce cruelty till it was banished-that no priest would grant absolution to the cruel man, till he had done due penance for his merciless deeds!

such

Humanity, mercy, compassion, are virtues especially required and insisted on by Christianity, and their influence is not limited to the human race. It extends to the whole worlds of reason, life, and sense; to the worm on the ground and the shell-fish on the rock, as well as to the

wounded traveller, the widow, and the orphan. How much good might the clergy of all denominations effect, were they sometimes to insist on these truths? how much more than any legislature for the correction of inhumanity ? Human laws may reach and punish a few of the most atrocious acts of cruelty which are exposed to observation; but there are thousands and ten thousands of such acts that escape their cognizance and defy their authority. To find a remedy for the evil, we must go to a higher source. We must appeal to the law of God. We must address the moral principles. We must bring the feelings of benevolence to operate on the conduct. We must instil the dews of compassion into the bosoms of our children. Humanity must elevate her voice and inculcate her precepts in the nursery-in the school-in the college in the lectureroom-in the courts of justice-in the pulpit. She must speak aloud with a hundred tongues, by the mouths of orators and poets, philosophers and divines, by mothers to their daughters, and by fathers to their sons, and by masters and mistresses to their male and female servants. She must invoke THE PRESS to stamp her dictates in the indelible characters of ink and type, and give them a passport to the extremities of the world. She must implore it to brand, with a disreputable stigma, every cruel deed; that those who are not to be allured to mercy by high and generous motives, may be deterred from cruelty by the dread of shame.

CHAPTER XI.

SHALL ANIMALS EXIST HEREAFTER?

Passimque soluti

Per campos pascuntur equi: quæ gratia currum
Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes

Pascere equos; eadem sequitur tellure repostos.-VIRG.

Their steeds around,

Free from their harness, graze the flow'ry ground;

The love of horses which they had alive

And care of chariots after death survive.-DRYDEN.

And thinks, admitted to that equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company.-POPE.

Such are the ideas entertained "by savage and by sage" of the world to come. They who have no idea of happiness beyond the gratification of the senses, think that inan's future bliss will consist in the enjoyment of such sensual pleasures as gratified him most upon earth. Hence Virgil's warriors delight in steeds and chariots; and Pope's Indian in a dog, a bottle, and a wife. These notions clearly imply a belief in the immortality of the souls of animals as well as of men. Christians generally entertain a more exalted notion of the joys of hereafter, and though one class would confine them to the contracted circle of their own denomination, another would extend them not only to all of their own species, but to the whole of animated being a doctrine which is at least more accordant with the benevolent spirit of Christianity, than that which would sentence the majority of the human race to everlasting burnings.

Various and contradictory are the opinions which have been formed of the metaphysical nature of animals. By one they are sunk to the level of insensate matter; by another exalted to immortality.

Some who are proud of their reason and their dignity in the scale of creation, but who are assuredly neither philosophers nor Christians, look down on animals with infinite scorn, and treat them as if they were automata or

self-moving machines, and seem scarcely willing to admit that they are composed of nerve and muscle like themselves. They endeavour, too, to justify their violation of the dictates of humanity on much the same principles, and with the same regard to good feeling, that a slave-dealer endeavours to justify his brutality to negroes, by pleading the inferiority of their intellect; as if that very inferiority, admitting it to exist, did not establish a claim to protection, instead of affording a plea for injury and abuse. They proceed on wrong ground in supposing that they exalt their reason and dignity by degrading animals. Allowing their own superiority, the more highly animals are exalted, the higher, too, must be that superiority; as the ruler of a civilized people holds a more honourable station than a ruler among savages. Elaborate treatises have been written to prove man a machine; and, indeed, if the term be applicable to brutes, we see not how it can be denied to man. But what propriety is there in the application of the term to the one or to the other? What are the points of identity or similarity? Has a machine affections, passions, feelings? Is it grateful for being wound up, or grieved if suffered to run down? it memory? And will it expire with joy, like the dog of Ulysses, to see its master, after a lapse of twenty years? If diseased, will it seek a cathartic, like the sparrow, in a dose of spiders; or an emetic, like the dog, in a medicinal grass? Will it help its digestion by swallowing gravel, as birds; or raise a shrill cry to warn its companions of an approaching enemy? Does it change its climate with the season; or rear a young progeny, and delight in the indulgence of parental affection?

Has

Granting that they are machines, is that any reason for treating them with barbarity? Should we not rather try to keep the springs and wheels of the machine in proper trim and motion; and not derange them by too rapid friction, or by laying on them a heavier burden than they can sustain? Has God formed them with such exquisite skill, only to be torn in pieces by human folly and wickedness? If they are short-lived by nature, should we render their lives shorter by injurious treatment? An argument for showing them kindness has been founded on

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