With the Children on Sundays / Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul

by Sylvanus Stall

I want to tell you about a boy who was once strolling through the fields with his sister. They found a nest of rabbits. The sister was charmed with the beautiful nest itself and with its living occupants, but the boy teased them, mimicking their squeaks and their struggles. In vain his sister plead with him not to hurt these pretty little creatures, but the wicked boy flung them up into the air one by one and shouted when each fell dead upon the stones. Ten years after the sister sat weeping again by that boy's side. He was in chains, sentenced to be hanged for shooting a farmer who was hunting in a neighbor's field. They were waiting for the awful procession to knock at the cell door. "Sister," he said, "do you remember the nest of rabbits ten years ago; how you begged and prayed, and how I ridiculed? I verily believe that from that day God forsook me, and left me to follow my own inclinations. If I had yielded to your tears then, you and I would not be weeping these bitter tears now."

You see how it is that boys who have no regard for the suffering, or the preservation of the life of animals are likely to inflict pain and even to take the lives of people.

But I want to call your attention to another respect in which we are like the animals, or perhaps, more correctly, in which the animals are like us. The forms of most all animals have some resemblance to each other, and all are somewhat in form like man. If you take the bird, his wings correspond to our arms, his legs and feet are somewhat like ours, only his toes are longer, and the nails are slightly different in form. If you will take the horse you will see that his neck is longer than ours, that his front legs correspond to our arms, and if you take your fingers and press them together you will see how, if you were to study the anatomy of the horse's foot carefully, it resembles the bones in our hands, and the bony foot of the horse corresponds to the nails on the ends of our fingers, only that in the case of the horse the nails are all in one, forming the hoof, to which the blacksmith nails the shoe. The horse's hoof, however, is not solid as you might think, but only a shell, the same as the nails on the ends of our fingers.

Birds.

Now if you were to take the turtle that lives in this shell or house you would find that he also has four legs, the front legs corresponding to our arms, and his hind legs corresponding to our legs and feet. On the end of each of his feet he has nails, the same as you and I have at the extremities of our hands and feet. But I am sure you would say that the turtle was very much unlike us, in that he has such a hard shell of a house which he carries about with him. But if you will feel of your hands you will discover that you have bones inside of your hands. So you have bones in your arms and all through your body. These bones of your body are covered with flesh, so our bones are inside of us. But with this turtle almost all of his bones are made into one bone, and that is on the outside of his body.

Our muscles, with which we move our hands and feet and different portions of our body, are attached to the bones which are inside of us. His muscles are attached to the bone which is on the outside of him. So you see that we are like him, in that both of us have bones, only his are on the outside while ours are on the inside.

His bone or shell is a covering and a defense. Our bones, on the inside of us, are so constructed as to enable us to defend ourselves also. God has given the turtle a house, but He has given us the knowledge and the skill, so that we can construct our own house. We are created with capacity to till the earth and to subdue the wild beasts of the forest, and with our superior intelligence to be king over all the other creatures which God has created.

Now, there are several lessons which we may learn from what I have said. God has protected all animals against their foes. He has not fully protected the animals against us, but He expects us to use our intelligence and our better nature, to be thoughtful and careful not to inflict pain even upon the worm or insect which crawls upon the ground beneath our feet.

While our bodies are somewhat like the bodies of birds and beasts, in our moral nature we are not like the animals, but like God. We were made in the moral likeness and image of God. We have intelligence and God has made us to know right from wrong. The animals have no conscience. Cattle do not recognize any wrong when they break out of their owner's pasture and break into a neighbor's cornfield. We do not say that cattle have sinned, because they know nothing of ownership. They do not know what is right and what is wrong, and, therefore, are not accountable beings. In our intellectual, moral and spiritual nature we are superior to everything else that God has created. We have a moral nature. We know what is right and what is wrong, and, therefore, we are accountable beings. God has made us free to follow our own purpose and, therefore, we are to be held accountable. God has created us not for a few days of life upon the earth, but He has made us immortal, and if we have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and accept Him as our Saviour and love and serve Him upon the earth, our condition in the next world will be one of great blessing and happiness.