Once again, for ourselves, there is no definite answer. The whole question forms but one more problem added to an interminable sequence, and in the face of which the man and the dog are both dumb.
Yet when we look back, and ask ourselves, “Are all these for naught?” is it still man’s province to be mute? Many further questions crowd up to the mind here, as they ever do in yet graver issues. In our weakness and our anxiety we cannot suffer our case to go by default, even though we confess our inability to answer the questions one by one as they appear. We can only turn away our heads and say, “Such things can not be.” This close relationship cannot be cut off and cease for ever. This touching interdependence cannot be brought to a sudden and a final end. The sparrows cannot be cared for and the dogs cast out. In other words, living things among animals, not directly associated with human beings in their lives, cannot, surely, be singly preserved and those which have won our love and loved us in return be lost to us for ever and condemned.
Is it possible that all these marvellous qualities and characteristics, gathered together into one dumb animal, are to pass away and to have no place in the larger circuit of life? Are all these consolations that this animal, and this animal alone among the so-called dumb, is capable of bringing—are all the influences for good that he is granted the power of exercising upon the mind, the spirit, and the very soul of man—to be accounted of no worth; to be merely so many items to be used up in the furtherance of a great scheme and plan; to be dissipated even as the mists of the dawn when the day shall at last break? Surely,—can such things be? Human judgment and human justice are for ever fallible, and rough expedients at best. But that other judgment for which we look, and that other justice upon which we are wont mentally to lean, cannot possibly be either one or the other.
Something, then, of our case may assuredly be left there. We cannot answer the questions; but, as we confront them, we yet cannot cut ourselves free from that spirit of intuition spoken of above, or cease to draw our several inferences. Continuity in Nature faces us at every turn. All things work together for the final perfection of the whole—for the final transcendent beauty and completeness of the whole. There is unity in all. Of that most are certain; and men walk therefore in good hope. There is mystery at every turn. There is no escape from it. There is ever the demand for the making of a good fight in the face of it. And there is promise of victory in the end on the part of One
| “Who by low creatures leads to heights of love.” |
We are not all willing to accept such things. We do not all, in our march in life, require the same tools to win our way. Neither do we all look in the same direction—not for help, merely, but for those common daily aids that we gather, or that are gatherable, from the simple and the great, from the animate and the inanimate, from the stained as from the beautiful and the pure.
In writing of the death of an animal second only to the dog, Whyte-Melville asks this:
| “There are men both good and wise who hold that, in a future state, Dumb creatures we have cherished here below Will give us joyous greeting as we pass the golden gate. Is it folly if I hope it may be so?” |
It may be folly. Yet the writer of these pages does not doubt it. And therefore, in the quiet corner of the beautiful home, when Murphy was laid to rest close by Dan, these words were cut upon his headstone, in faith and in good hope: