THE FUTURE STATE OF ANIMALS.
CANON WILBERFORCE has been interviewed by the correspondent of the Westminster Gazette on his creed, —or, perhaps, we should rather say, his opinion,—as to the future state of animals, and his views on the subject are contained in the Westminster Gazette of last Monday in a very clear and concise form. He began by asserting that in the divine mind there is no succession of past, present, and future, and he argues from that assumption that anything which has once had an existence in the divine mind can never cease to have an existence in it. Bat, then, surely the pre- miss is much too large for the conclusion. If it be true that there is no past, present, and future in the eternal mind,—if there be nothing but an eternal now,—then all evolution, all transition, is illusory, and there is no more reason why we should take a transitory phase of what we perceive as "being" as the true clue to the eternal reality, than its non- existence through a whole eternity ex parts ante during which that phase of being was never apprehended by men at all. If once we deny to the eternal mind any recognition of temporary phenomena, there is no more reason why we should not regard the infinite past which preceded any particular creature's existence here as representing the eternal reality, rather than the transient flash of a feeble and tempo- rary flame of life. If time be an illusion, which of the two is the more illusory,—the speck of time in which finite beings are visible to us, or the infinitude in which they were not so visible ? Once let us impute to God only an eternal now, and that assumption may be used even more effectually to prove that all temporary existence is illusion, than to prove that all death, all non-existence, is illusion. For our own parts, we heartily believe that in the divine mind, change, history, evolution, are discerned as a true procession of the ages, and we could just as easily admit that neither man nor any other animal ever had been, on the ground that there was a time when they were not, as believe that they could never cease to be, simply and solely because, if they had once risen like the air-bubbles to the surface of the tide of creation, they would represent divine ideas, and be eternal. Admit that existence involves an infinitude both before and after, and we must equally admit that non-existence involves an infini- tude both before and after, too. The assumption,—which seems to us totally unfounded,—cuts both was, if it cuts either.
Nor can we agree with those who argue with Canon Wil- berforce, that the story of the animals being brought to the first man to name implies that some state has existed in which, before the taint of sin was introduced into the world, mental communication between man and the lower animals was of that frank and fraternal kind which it is destined to assume again when there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, and all things shall be subject to the law of Christ. Before that can happen, we should suppose that there must be some great fundamental change in the organisation of the whole animal world. Nothing can be more obvious than that that world, as it is now constituted, is specially organised for the work of mutual destruction. Even man himself is marked by those destructive instincts which appear to give him, on the whole, more delight than pain. The joy of the chase which he shares with so many other creatures, especially the dog, is not the kind of joy which we can imagine that perfect man would ever display; and as for the adder and the scorpion and the tiger, and the shark and the sword-fish,—who can suppose for a moment that these ever existed in a state in which there was no use at all for the organs which secrete venom, and tear flesh, and are evidently adapted for that very purpose of destruction for which, in the restitution of all things," there could be no use at all We agree with Canon Wilberforce that the story of Eden is allegorical, and intended to show the relative position of man and the lower animal races. But for that very reason, we cannot think it the story of any actual past at all. Nature "red in tooth and claw," is the nature of the past even more emphatically than of the present. In the present, man at least, and perhaps some others of the animal races, have developed some germs of that victory over destructive instincts which we know to be prophetic of a higher and better state of existence. But it is incredible that the beasts of prey, and the parasites which live by bur- rowing into the organisation of animals higher than them- selves, and the wasps which provide food for their young on the paralysed forms of half-killed grasshoppers in order that they may neither escape nor die too soon for the sus- tenance of their as yet unhatched offspring, should have been created in a world in which there was absolutely no use for their offensive functions, though they are of the very essence of their structure. That the animal world may very pos- sibly be intended to develop eventually into something far higher and more peaceful than anything it now presents to our view, we hope, and also that the conflict for existence was
intended from the first gradually to develop this higher kind of life. Such a purpose seems to us not obscurely written in the order of things just as the temporary and obvious meaning of sting and tooth and claw is written on the very surface. But it is not in the past, it is in the future, that we must Look for the euthanasia of carnivorous and poison-secreting organs. If the lion is ever to lie down with the lamb, we may feel pretty sure that the lion will lose a great many of the most salient characteristics of his present organisation, and -acquire a great many very different qualities, before that time arrives.
Still less can we attach any of the importance which Canon Wilberforce seems to attach to St. Peter's vision of the vessel let down from heaven, of all manner "of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts and creeping things, and fowls of the air,"—a vessel which was subsequently" drawn up" again into heaven. Canon Virilberforce's notion that the drawing up -again into heaven implied that, "as the lowest animals are sharers in man's painful earth-education, they should not .be excluded from man's paradise hereafter," is, we fear, fanciful in the extreme. The whole vision was confessedly a mere parable intended to teach Peter that what God had himself cleansed, he was not entitled to call common. But, illegitimate as it would be to contend that because the visionary voice called upon Peter to "arise, kill, and eat," therefore the lower animals in their celestial state are still destined to be killed and eaten by men, it would be less illegitimate, we think, than to regard the drawing up of the visionary sheet into heaven as a distinct intimation that the creatures whose forms it contained are all living there, and living a new celestial life. Most of the passages in Scripture which are supposed to testify to the immortality of the lower animals, appear to us to have no bearing on the question at all. But we would not say the same of the great passage in which St. Paul speaks of the "whole creation" as groaning and travailing in pain until now, " waiting for the redemption of our body," which no doubt implied, and was intended to imply, that there is some "far-off divine event" to which not only man, but the whole constitution of terrestrial nature, is journeying, as a traveller journeys towards his goal. Let it once be admitted that the purpose of creation is an ideal purpose, and that that ideal purpose will by slow degrees be realised, and it becomes very difficult not to accept evolution as tending, not only in its higher, but also in its lower phases, to the elimination of all that is evil and the development of all that is good. Whether redemption in this larger sense is to be achieved by all creatures made subject to the law of suffering and sacrifice, or whether there may be a law of redemption for the type which yet does not include any redemption of the individual ` lives which are included in that type, we cannot, of course, say. It is quite beyond us to judge whether there may not be plenty of finite creatures which are mere instruments in the discipline and education of beings higher than them- selves, and which have no greater claim to any individual immortality than the grain of sand or the crystal or the flower. That is quite a tenable view, and the late Charles Kingsley surely went beyond the region of even probable evidence when he said, as Canon Wilberforce reports him, that "Christ lived and died and survived as much for the minutest insect sucked into the jaws of a whale, as for the most intelligent of human beings." It may be so; but it far transcends anything of the nature of revealed truth, to declare that it is so. Unquestionably redemption is, in the first place, revealed to us as redemption from sin, and we cannot conceive of a creature incapable of sin, as needing redemp- tion,—at least in the only sense in which redemption was an- nounced by Christ, —until it has so far risen in the scale of creation, as to be capable of both sin and righteousness. And it is surely mere conjecture whether every ephemeral being -which flits across the scene is destined for such a career in the invisible world as will eventually raise it to the stage of a moral and spiritual existence. But this at least may be said, that there are several beings below the level of man which appear to have both strong personal affections and rudiments at least of a conscience. Even Mr. Romanes is one of the -most earnest believers in the conscience of the dog, and there can be no question at all that the dog is capable of a kind of fidelity which presents all the characteristics of loyal and tpassionate devotion. When that is the case, and no doubt the same remark applies to many other animals besides dogs, there
appear to be the germs of true moral and spiritual quality, and we could hardly accept the truth of human immortality without thinking it most probable that the same persis- tence of individual life may be be expected in races displaying such qualities whose life is limited to the visible world, and has not as yet been even partially lived in the invisible. Wherever something like human affec- tions and human fidelity has been displayed, we may fairly look for ultimate participation in human redemption. But we should very much hesitate to assert, with Charles Kingsley, that every "minutest insect sucked into the jaws of a whale" has the same share in Christ's life and death and resurrection as beings who have felt the burden and revolted against the galling yoke of moral evil. There is surely a far greater chasm between such an insect and a moral being, than there is between the "corn of wheat" which, when it dies, brings forth much fruit, and the animalcule in question. It seems to us that the reasons which make for human immortality only begin to tell upon the issue after we have reached the level in which the germs of moral and spiritual life show themselves. Beneath that level we see no more explicit evidence for expecting continued individuality and growth, than there is for expecting the evolution of a nature sus- ceptible of such growth. Redemption and restitution im- ply something to redeem and restore. But there is no more need for redemption and restitution, so far as we can judge, in a worm or a sea-anemone, than there is in a turnip or a nettle. We heartily agree, however, with Canon Wilber- force's remarks on the question of vivisection, which, when practised on creatures capable of conscience and affection, seems tons in the highest degree not only cruel but unnatural.
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