'Murphy': A Message to Dog Lovers

by Ernest Gambier-Parry

Perhaps so.

The fact does not forbid the familiar question that rises always at certain hours to the mind of man, and will continue to do so till time shall cease, whether his friend take human or only canine form in life:

“But his spirit—where does his spirit rest? It was God that made him—God knows best.”

In truth, there is no answer to this question—“Whither?” And thus it is that we are compelled to leave it according to our habit when we are at fault, and much as the poet leaves it here. In the case of the man, we think we understand. In that of the dog, our difficulty appears to defy solution: it is no question of argument, assertions are idle, dogma has no place. On the one hand we have those principles that come to man’s aid, but of which it would be unbecoming now to speak. The vast majority of Christian men are enabled to ride out the storms of life without confidence wholly giving way, and with the first of sheet-anchors fixed in what is felt to be the best of holding ground. When, however, we turn to the possible future status of the dog, there is no sheet-anchor, and the holding ground is indifferent. Yet, in considering the case of the man and the dog, we are not left without a certain measure of support equally applicable to both. The spirit definable as the immediate apprehension of the mind without reasoning—the spirit of intuition—aids us on either hand. “We are endued,” as Bishop Butler tells us, “with capacities of perception”; and these enable us to accept much that lies outside the actual region of proof, because our inner consciousness tells us that we are not altogether on a false track, and that truths, if half hidden, yet, of a certainty, exist in the direction in which we are making earnest search.

We necessarily suffer here, as always, from the tendency that makes the wish the father to the thought; or, in other words, we not infrequently shovel the unpalatable overboard, that we may lighten the ship, and ride out this or that squall without quite so much strain upon the sheet-anchor aforesaid. The majority of mankind believe, and will continue to believe, most staunchly in what they wish to believe. Yet this tendency on our part—visible as it often is in directions where we should least expect to find it—does not necessarily prove our beliefs false, while it also leads us not infrequently direct to truths, however unorthodox our course may have appeared to lookers-on.

In considering, then, the question of the possible future existence of our canine friends, the dominant feeling is commonly this: We believe that a future, in great probability, exists for them, because we feel that not to believe this would be to turn the whole scheme of the universe, as we understand it, into one little short of nonsense. We do not stop to reason: such things are because they must be; they cannot cease to be without total disfigurement of the plan of our conception. Intuition points, and almost impulsively perhaps, in one direction. There is “an intelligent Author of Nature or Natural Governor of the world.” Life is not made up of haphazards. Eventually there will be happiness in completest form: otherwise there would be injustice, and of this, life, as we know it, affords little or no evidence. For happiness to be complete, there can be no question of the songs we are to hear being indifferently harmonised, there can be no rifts in the lute: in a state of perfection imperfections must necessarily be imperceptible.

With our narrow, human limitations we are driven to conclusions naturally circumscribed and coloured by those limitations. We are cognisant of the narrowness of the field of vision allowed us, and we are perpetually made aware that we are beating our wings against the bars; but we nevertheless accept this or that conclusion because it satisfies our souls, or we refuse to accept it because we cannot honestly confess that it does so. Yet, once again, behind both acceptance and rejection there is something further—that intuition and power of perception that enable us to find satisfaction in inferences that we know lie outside questions of faith, but which we nevertheless feel to be true. And the very fact that we are enabled to derive this satisfaction and to feel that our conclusions have an element of truth in them tends to confirm us, rightly or wrongly, in our conjectures.

Thus we come deliberately to the opinion that dogs will have a place in the land over the border. Such an opinion may be a bold one; but there is reason for believing that it is somewhat widely held. We naturally tend to materialise when we build up our several pictures; but we sin here, if at all, in the best of company. The city that lay foursquare, and that is described to us in the vision in the Island of Patmos, was of pure gold, with walls of jasper and gates of precious stones, and had within it trees and birds and many divers animals, and material things of greatest beauty, besides the figures of innumerable angels. The description could not have been otherwise drawn if it was to be grasped by the mind of man, even to a limited extent. So with ourselves. To conceive of a world with all the attributes of beauty yet without flowers is impossible. To realise a world full of music and song yet without birds may be possible, but transcends the powers of most minds. To attempt to believe in the happiness of a world where companionship is to be looked for and reunion is promised, yet where the companionship of dogs is denied, is to strain the belief of some to the uttermost and not improbably to fail.

“Nor,” writes Bishop Butler in his immortal treatise, “can we find anything throughout the whole analogy of nature to afford us even the slightest presumption that animals ever lose their living powers; much less, if it were possible, that they lose them by death: for we have no faculties wherewith to trace any beyond or through it, so as to see what becomes of them. This event removes them from our view. It destroys the sensible proof, which we had before death, of their being possessed of living powers, but does not appear to afford the least reason to believe that they are, then, or by that event, deprived of them. And our knowing that they were possessed of these powers, up to the very period to which we have faculties capable of tracing them, is itself a probability of their retaining them beyond it.”

When Robert Southey looked for the last time on his old friend, Phillis—and there is a bitter difference on such an occasion between looking upon the young and the old—he tells how often in his earlier days this dog and he had enjoyed childish sports together, and how, later on, when hard times overtook him, he found delight in recalling the faithful fondness of the friend in the distant home, and longed to feel again the warmth of his dumb welcome. Then, when the old dog is at last dead, and there has come a severance of these precious associations, he breaks out with: