The Rev. J. G. Wood has written a most interesting book on Man and Beast: Here and Hereafter, with the especial aim of proving the immortality of the brute creation, showing that they share with man the attributes of reason, language, memory, a sense of moral responsibility, unselfishness, and love, all of which belong to the spirit and not to the body.
Bayard Taylor says, “If one should surmise a lower form of spiritual being yet equally indestructible, who need take alarm?” “Yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity,” said the Preacher, more than two thousand years ago. In Taylor’s poem to an old horse, Ben Equus, which died on the farm when he was a young man, he uses the same idea:
For I may dream fidelity like thine,
May save some essence in thee from decay,
That, not neglected by the Soul Divine,
Thy being rises on some unknown way.
Some intermediate heaven, where fields are fresh,
And golden stables littered deep with fern;
Where fade the wrongs that horses knew in flesh,
And all the joys that horses felt return.