Life is multiple and interchangeable. Life continues on earth not in permanent radiating lines, but in flowing union; the forms combining, separating, growing, in and through one another.
Perhaps our error lies in fixing our minds in the eaten instead of the eater; dwelling on the loss of the killed, instead of the gain of the killer.
We say "all creatures eat one another," and it grieves us. Why not say "all creatures feed one another?" There is something beautiful in that.
Life, to each creature, is all time—all that he has any knowledge of—and living is a pleasure lasting all that time. Death, on the other hand, is but a moment, and even so is a pleasure to the wolf who eats, if not to the sheep who is eaten.
We, with our larger range of thought, and with our strange religions theories, have complicated and warped the thought of death by associate ideas. We place conscious fear before it, and load that fear with threats of eternal punishment.
We try to measure the wholesome facts of life by arbitrary schemes of later devising, and life seems dreary by contrast.
When we look at the facts themselves, however; see the grass green and thick for all its cropping; fish swimming in great schools, "as good as ever were caught"; the oysters peacefully casting forth their millions of eggs to make up for all that are eaten; this whole blooming, fruiting world of life and love; we find these to be the main things, the real prominent features of the performance; and death but a "lightning change artist," a quick transformation, in which one living form turns into another, while life goes on.
Meanwhile, in our human affairs it would be a good thing if we would develop as keen a sense of the responsibility of giving life as we have in taking it. We hold three powers in the life-process—a degree of choice and judgment as to who comes on the stage, some power to decide who shall go off, and when, and, most important of all, the ability to modify life while we have it.
Is it not singular that there should be so much sentiment about taking life and so little about giving it? We give life almost as thoughtlessly as the beasts below us. We are variously minded about taking it, killing many good men in war, and not killing many bad ones in peace, except an ill-selected few; but as yet we have no deep feeling about the struggles and sufferings of people while they live.
If we become religiously careful about the kind of people that are born, and about the treatment they get after they are born, it will make more difference to human happiness, and human progress, than would the establishment of a purely vegetable diet, the abolition of capital punishment, or even the end of war.