The passage: The creature waits in earnest expectation for the sons of God to be made manifest. (Romans viii. 19.)
Let us try to reach the idea in St Paul’s mind that these words stand for. It is no worthless idea or platitude a man may leave behind because he fails to grasp it at once; Paul believes it vitally tied to the life and death of his Master. He had seen Jesus with bodily eyes, but also with the real eyes that see only by understanding, and the sight lifted his whole nature, first his pure will for righteousness, then his hoping imagination. Out of these, in the knowledge of Jesus, he spoke.
Written in the power of this uplifting, Paul’s letters have waked only poor ideas in poor minds, for words always seem to mean something within the scope of the mind hearing them. They cannot carry a thinker’s thought to a no-thinker, or the mind of a soul aspiring and discontented with itself to one satisfied with his poverty and counting his meagre faculty the human standard. The higher the idea Paul’s words wake in us, the likelier it is the same that moved the man who had seen Jesus. If we err in interpreting him, it will hardly be by attributing too high an intent.
First, what does Paul mean by ‘the creature’ or ‘the creation’? If the visible world, he surely did not, without saying so, exclude its noblest part, the sentient; and if he did, it is doubly strange that he then attributes conscious sense to what remained, the insentient. If you call this a figure of speech, a figure that means less than it says is unworthy of the Lord’s messenger.
To exclude the sentient from creation and then give the sentient’s capacities to the insentient, as a figure for men’s hopes of perfecting it for their comfort, would be a violence unfit in rhetoric and in itself. Consider also: ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.’ To read that of the imperfections of the insensate material world would make it a worthless hyperbole. I am inclined to believe the apostle saw the whole visible creation as, in widely differing degrees of consciousness, a live outcome of the heart of the living one who is all in all, though I do not insist on it. I argue only that creature or creation must include everything with sentient life, all creatures capable of suffering. Their state lets him speak of the whole creation as suffering in its divine development, groaning in the pangs of birth toward a better self, a nobler world. The creation need not know what it groans after: the human race groans for deliverance, yet how much does it know that its redemption lies in becoming one with the Father and sharing his glory? Here and there one knows it, which is a pledge for the race, but the race has no notion of what alone can stay its groaning. So the whole creation groans after an unforeseen yet essential birth, to be freed from a transitional state that nowise answers the intent in which existence began.
To believe that God made many lower creatures merely for prey, or as slaves of a slave under a cruel master, or made an endless succession of them to get little from life but its end (a doctrine some hold and multitudes practically accept), is to believe in a demon, toward that part of his creation at least. A creative demon is an absurdity; were such a creator possible, he would not be God, and the real God would one day destroy him. Still, suffering abounds among them, and even if God did not foresee how creation would turn out for them, it lies at his door. He has made them so far dumb that they cannot move their oppressors by telling how hard the world is. The apostle takes up their case, and gives us material to answer those who blame God for it.
Many, I suspect, gather from Romans viii only that the lower animals alive at the Lord’s coming, and those who come after, will lead a happy life for the time allotted them. What disciples of Jesus, to find such a gloss consolation for the moans of a universe! For all the creatures who through ages of misery have groaned and died, these mild Christians find it enough that they are dead and so out of it: ‘their sufferings are over; they had not to live on for ever in oppression.’ That is some consolation for those gone, for rest is better than ceaseless toil. But what of the heedless God these Christians are content to worship? Is he merciful? Loving? How shall he die to escape the remorse of authorship of so much misery? Our pity turns from the dead creature to the live creator who could know himself the maker of so many extinguished hearts, whose friend was not he but Death. Blessed be the name of the Father of Jesus, there is no such creator!
But there are the living who suffer too: is there no comfort for them but that they will die? And what of those yet to come, daily born into evil things? Will the thought that they will soon die suffice the child who laments his dead bird or rabbit and would fain love the father in heaven who keeps on making the creatures? Would those Christians have me believe in a God who makes creatures only to be prey to other creatures, or to spend a few hours or years helpless, speechless and without appeal in merciless hands, then pass into nothingness? I will not; in the name of Jesus, I will not. Had he not known something better, would he have said what he did about the Father and the sparrows?
What many call their beliefs are but prejudices they have picked up; why should such believers spare a thought for their paltry fellow-inhabitants of the planet? And not a few, indignant if their belief in God is questioned, yet greatly fear imagining him better than he is: is it he or themselves they dread injuring by expecting too much of him? ‘You see the plain facts,’ they say; ‘what can be done for the poor things, unless you take the absurd notion that they too have a life beyond the grave?’
Why should that notion seem absurd? The teachers of the nation have, I think through unbelief, wronged the animals deeply by their silence about the popular presumption that they have no hereafter, as if the Preserver of man and beast never thought of keeping one beast alive beyond a certain time; heartless men might then argue that he did not care how they wronged the animals. Their immortality is no new faith with me, but as old as my childhood.
Do you believe in immortality for yourself? If not, I have no argument with you. If you do, why not for the animals? Were immortality no greater a thing for them than it seems to some who profess to expect it, I should scarcely care to insist on their share. But if the thought is precious to you, is it essential to your enjoyment that nothing less than yourself should share it? Would God, had he been of like heart with you, have given immortality to creatures so much less than himself as we? If they are not worth making immortal, how were they worth calling out of no-being? You would have him go on for ever creating new things with one hand and annihilating those he made with the other, unless you prefer an earth without animals. If it were harder for God to keep the former alive than to send forth new ones, his creatures would be no better than a child’s toys, made and destroyed as he goes. For what purpose is the maker of the sparrow present at its death, if he does not care whether it dies comforted or lost in the abyss? If his presence is no good to the sparrow, what good will it be to you when your hour comes? Believe that the heart of the universe is tenderer, more loving, more just than yours or mine, and not by a little only.
If you did not believe you would outlive death, I could not blame you for thinking all was over with the sparrow; but to believe in immortality for yourself and not for the sparrow is hard-hearted and selfish. If it would make you happy to think the sparrow lives on too, I would gladly help you to hope it.
I know no reason why I should not look for the animals to rise again in the sense in which I hope to rise myself: to reappear clothed in another and better form of life. If the Father will raise his children, why not also those he has taught his little ones to love? Love is the one bond of the universe, the heart of God, the life of his children; if animals can be loved they are loveable, and if they can love, yet more so. Love is eternal; how then should its object perish? If God gave us the creatures that a new phase of love might be born in us toward another kind of life from the same fountain, why should the new life perish any more than the new love? Can you imagine that, hereafter, if one of God’s little ones asked him to give again an old earthly love, a kitten or pony or squirrel or dog, the Father would say no? What a child may ask for, the Father will keep ready.
That there are difficulties in believing thus I grant; impossibilities, I deny. The first is perhaps the many forms of life we cannot desire to see again. But while we would gladly keep the perfected forms of the higher animals, we may hope that those of many other kinds are as transitory as their bodies, belonging only to a stage of development. All animal forms tend to higher: why should not the individual, as well as the race, pass through stages of ascent? If I have myself gone through each of the typical forms of lower life on my way to the human (made probable by antenatal history), I see no reason why each of the lower animals should not pass upward through a succession of bettering embodiments. This theory needs another to complement it: that men and women who will not strive toward the great human-divine idea are sent back down to the stage of fish or insect or reptile beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance. Some men appear never to have approached the development of the more human of the lower animals. Let those take care who look contemptuously on animals, lest in misusing one they misuse some ancestor of their own, sent back as the one mercy for him to far past forms and another chance of passing the self-made barrier. The suggestion may seem ridiculous, but what if it should be true? I do not care to argue it. What I press is this: if we believe in the progress of creation as hitherto manifested, and in the marvellous changes of form in every individual of certain classes, why should there be difficulty in hoping that old lives may reappear in new forms? The typical soul reappears in a higher type; why not the individual soul in a higher form?
Multitudes count it safest to hold to a dull scheme of things: can it be because, like David in Browning’s Saul, they dread worsting the Giver by inventing better gifts than his? That we do not know is the best reason for hoping to the full extent God has made possible. If we go wrong, it will be in the direction of the right, and easier to correct than the result of refusing to imagine and leaving traditional prepossessions to rule our hearts, with no claim but the poverty of their expectation from the paternal riches. Those who hope little cannot grow much; to them the very glory of God must be a small thing. In the nature of divine things, the commonplace must be false. The stupid, self-satisfied soul, which cannot know its stupidity and will not trouble to understand or imagine, is the farthest behind of all the backward children in God’s nursery.
I know no cause of reasonable difficulty in the continued existence of the lower animals except the present nature of some of them. But what Christian will dare say that God does not care about them, whom he knows as we cannot? Great or small, they are his; great are all his results, small all his beginnings. That we must send many of his creatures out of this phase of life because of their hurtfulness in this phase of ours is no stumbling-block to me. The long combat of the race with such creatures, and man’s repeated victory, has had an essential share in developing humanity, which is making man capable of knowing God; and when their part to that end is done, changed conditions may speedily bring about that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid.
I would now lead my companion closer to the idea that burned in the apostle’s heart when he wrote Romans viii. How far ahead he is, in his hope for the creation, of the footsore and halting brigade of Christians now crossing the world! He knew Christ, and so could look into the Father’s will.
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God!
At the head of one of his poems Henry Vaughan has this Latin version of the verse, which I do not know whether he found or made; it is closer to the sense than ours:
‘Etenim res creatae exerto capite observantes expectant revelationem filiorum Dei.’—‘For the things created, watching with head thrust out, await the revelation of the sons of God.’
Why?
Because God has subjected the creation to vanity in the hope that it shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The creation eagerly watches for this double deliverance, from corruption and from the subjection to vanity that follows it.
God meets the bondage of corruption with subjection to vanity. Corruption is the breaking up of the essential idea, the falling away from the original life-causing thought; it is met by the suffering it causes, and that suffering is for redemption. The life in the corrupting thing makes suffering possible; the live part, not the corrupted part, suffers; the redeemable, not the doomed, is subjected to vanity. A race in which evil is at work needs this as its one hope against the supremacy of corruption; and the whole encircling, helping creation must, for man’s sake and its own, share the subjection with its hope of deliverance.
Corruption brings in vanity, empty aching gaps in vitality. This aching, which most people regard as evil, is the unpleasant cure of evil. It takes all shapes of suffering, of body, mind, heart and spirit, and is altogether beneficent: without it, what hope would there be for the rich and powerful, set on their own way, or for the self-indulgent, conceited, greedy and miserly? The more things men seek, the more they are subject to vanity, whose forms may all be summed in the word disappointment. He who would not house with disappointment must seek the incorruptible, the true, breaking the bondage of havings and shows, rumours, praises and selfish pleasures, and coming out of the false into the real, out of darkness into light. To bring men to this, the gulf of the inane yawns before them; aghast, they cry, ‘Vanity of vanities!’ and beyond the abyss begin to espy the eternal world of truth.
Note ‘the hope that the creation itself also,’ as something besides God’s men and women, ‘shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.’ The creation is to share their deliverance, liberty and glory. Deliverance from corruption must include escape from its very home and goal, death, in all its kinds and degrees. When you say there is no more death for the children of God, remember that the creature’s deliverance is into their liberty. Dead, in bondage to corruption, how can they share it?
If such are the apostle’s words, does he or does he not hold the immortality of the animals? If you say he means only that creatures alive at the Lord’s coming will be freed from corrupt man’s tyranny, I refer you to what I have said of the poverty of that reading, which accepts the failure of justice and love toward all who have passed away or must yet pass away before that coming. For the man whose heart aches to adore a faithful creator, what comfort is in such news? Is God enough to care for those who happen to live at one time but not for those at another? Shall we not rather believe that the vessels of less honour, the misused, the maltreated, shall be filled full with creative wine at last? Shall not the children have little dogs under the Father’s table, with plenty of crumbs let fall? If there was such provision for the sparrows of our Lord’s sojourn, and he will bring yet better when he comes again, how should the dead sparrows and their sorrows be passed over by him with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning? Would the deliverance of the creatures into the groaned-for liberty have been worth mentioning if their share in the glory of the sons of God were to die away within a few years? But the gifts of God are without repentance.
How St Paul longs for and loves liberty! Only he is a true lover of liberty who will die to give it to his neighbour, and Paul loved liberty more than his own. How different his notion of it is from the dull modern fancies of heaven in the popular hymn-books! The new heaven and new earth will at least be a heaven and an earth. What would the newest earth be to the old children without its animals? Barer than the heavens emptied of the constellations called by their names. If the earth must have animals, why not the old ones, already dear? The sons of God are not a new race but the old race glorified; so why a new race of animals, and not the old ones glorified?
The apostle says they are to share the liberty of the sons of God: will it not be a liberty like ours, always ready to be offered on the altar of love? How sweet the animals’ service will be, thus offered, and how sweet to minister to them in their turns of need! For doubtless they will then flee to us for help, as now they flee from us in dread of our tyranny. What lovelier feature in the new earth than the old animals glorified with us in our common home, the house of our father, each kind an unfailing pleasure to the other? Ah, what horses! Ah, what dogs! The whole redeemed creation goes to make up St Paul’s heaven. He had learned of him who would leave no one out, who made the excuse for his murderers that they did not know what they were doing.
Is not the prophecy on the groaning creation to be fulfilled in the new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, which involves its existence beyond this world, and so immortality? Would it not be more like the king eternal, immortal, invisible, to create nothing that could die, and slay nothing but evil? ‘For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.’
But what is this liberty of the children of God, for which the whole creation waits? The children themselves await it; when they have it, their house and retinue, the creation, whose fate hangs on theirs, will share it.
All liberty consists in realizing the ideal harmony between the creative will and the created life, in the creature’s active being corresponding to the creator’s idea, which is his substantial soul. The creature’s liberty is what obedience to the law of his existence effects for him. A soul that moves counter to the will of its prime cause finds the universe its prison. But Paul is not at the moment thinking of the metaphysical notion of liberty or its religious realization; he has in thought the birth of the soul’s consciousness of freedom.
Paul adds that not only the creation groans: we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for the redemption of our body. We are not free until our body is redeemed; then all the creation will be free with us, for he regards the creation as part of our embodiment. The whole creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God, which is the redemption of their body, an idea extending to their whole material envelopment. For this as for them the bonds of corruption must fall away; it must be what it was created for, a vital temple perfected by the unbroken indwelling of its divinity.
The liberty here intended is not that essential liberty, freedom from sin, but the completing of the redemption of the spirit by the redemption of the body. Evil has constantly worked to turn our house of the body into a prison, more opaque, heavy and insensible, filled with aches and pains. The freest soul, the purest of lovers, would not feel absolutely at large while chained to a dying body, and the more hampered that the body was his own. So the making of the body a perfected, responsive house-alive is essential to Paul’s notion of deliverance: the new man must have a new body with a new heaven and earth. Paul never thinks of himself as released from body; he desires a perfect one, a heaven-made house in place of the earth-made one, suited only to this lower stage of life, unsafe from the first and now much dilapidated in the Master’s service. He wants a spiritual body that will not thwart but second the spirit; I presume such a body as the Lord died with, changed by the interpenetrating of the creative indwelling will into the body with which he rose. A body like his is, I imagine, necessary to bring us into true contact with the creation, of which there must be multitudinous phases we cannot now be aware of.
The way good and indifferent people alike blame their bodies and look to death rather than to God-aided struggle to set them at liberty seems to me low and cowardly: the master fleeing from the slave, despising and fearing him at once. We must hold the supremacy over our bodies, but not despise body; it is a divine thing. Body and soul are in the image of God, and the lord of life was last seen in the glorified body of his death, which I believe he still wears. But we shall do better without these bodies that suffer and grow old, which may be, as some think, only the husks of our real bodies. Helpful as they have been, we are not in altogether helpful company while our houses have stains that friendly death alone, it may be, can wash out, and sores that only the builder’s hand, rebuilding in nobler material, can banish.
When the sons are free and their bodies redeemed, they will lift the lower creation with them into their liberty. Paul seems to believe that perfection in their kind awaits the humbler inhabitants of our world too, immediately after the sons of God are manifested: for our sakes and their own they were made subject to vanity, and for our sakes and their own they shall be raised higher with us.
Has the question no interest for you? It would, had you the heart you must one day have, big enough to love any life God has created. Had the Lord cared as little for what was lower than himself as you do, you would not now be looking for any redemption.
I have omitted the word adoption, used in both English versions; it is no translation of the Greek word it stands for. Paul uses it to mean the same as ‘the redemption of the body,’ which at once puts the usual interpretation in question. A falser translation was never made, given the importance of the thing signified and the substitution of an idea not only untrue but mischievous. What Paul means has nothing to do with adoption; Galatians iv makes clear what he intends. His unusual word means the father’s recognition, when the child comes of age, of the child’s relation to him, by giving him his fitting place of dignity in the house; here the deliverance of the body is the great Father’s act of recognition, completing, crowning and declaring the man’s freedom. It means the manifestation of the grown-up sons of God, the showing as sons of those who have always been his children, brought out before the universe in such attire and attendance that to look at them is to see what they are, the sons of the house, those to whom their elder brother applied the words ‘I said ye are Gods.’
If the sons groan, looking to be lifted up, and the other inhabitants of their world groan with them, shall they not be lifted up too? Have they not a faithful creator? He must be a selfish man who does not desire it.
It appears, then, that in the apostle’s expectation the new heavens and new earth of the sons of God are to be inhabited also by blessed animals, inferior but risen, and I think yet to rise in continuous development.
Here let me say again, more strongly, something I have already said:
When the apostle speaks of the whole creation, could he have dismissed the animals to regard trees and flowers as bearing their part in the groaning of the burdened world? Or, forgetting animals, trees and flowers, could he have meant only the bulk of the earth, its mountains, valleys, plains, seas and rivers? If so, the portion that least can feel or know is, to the apostle of love, immeasurably more important than the portion that loves and moans and cries. And he would then attribute the suffering faculty of the excluded, far more sentient portion to the less sentient, and build on it the vision of its redemption! His rhapsody of hope would be a puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, special pleading for nothing.
Much would I like to know what animals the apostle saw on his travels or around his home, and their conditions. They were often suffering creatures, and Paul, growing hourly in likeness to his maker and theirs, overflowed with sympathy. Perhaps as he wrote he felt a throb of pity for the beasts he had to kill at Ephesus.
If the Lord said little about animals, could he have done more for them than tell men his father cared for them? He has thereby wakened in men’s hearts a seed his father planted; it grows slowly but has borne a little precious fruit. His friend St Francis helped him, and many are trying; whoever sows the seed of that seed helps the Son. Our behaviour to the animals and our words about them are seed, good or bad, in our children’s hearts. No one can tell to what the animals might grow, even on the old earth, if dealt with according to their true position in regard to us. They are in a real and divine sense our kindred. I call them our poor relations to suggest that poor relations are often ill used. We should try to develop every true relation. He who is prejudiced against a relative because he is poor is himself an ill-bred relative, and ill-breeding is an excluding fault with the court of the high countries, where poverty is welcome and vulgarity inadmissible.
Those who love certain animals selfishly, pampering them as so many mothers do their children that they may be loved in return, betray them to their enemies. They love favourites, not animals, and help make the world dislike animals; theirs are the dogs that growl and snap inhospitably. A dog-parliament would condemn such dogs to be discreetly bitten and their mistresses avoided. If animals are meant to grow, she is the enemy of any animal whose development she stunts by unwise indulgence; that animal is not in the fair way to enter whatever heaven animals have. The education of the lower lies at the door of the higher, and in true education is truest kindness.
But what shall I say of those who torture animals for any end? I hardly dare trust myself to express my judgment of their conduct.
‘We are investigators; we are not doing it for our own sakes, but for the sake of others, our fellow-men.’
The higher your motive, the greater the blame of your unrighteousness. Must we congratulate you on a love for your fellows that inspires you to wrong the weaker, who have no helper against you? Would we call worthy a man who robbed another too feeble to protect himself, for his friend’s sake? No real good can grow in the soil of injustice.
I cannot help suspecting that the desire to know has a greater share in the enormity than the desire to help. Alas for the science that sacrifices the law of righteousness merely to behold a law of sequence! The tree of knowledge will never prove to man the tree of life. No law says, Thou shalt know; a thousand laws cry, Thou shalt do right. The greed of knowing casts out righteousness, mercy and faith. Whatever benefit may be wrought for higher creatures, the injustice to the lower is not affected. Justice has no respect of persons, but the weaker surely most need it.
Labour is a law of the universe and death a law of this world at least, and neither is an evil; both are for the best good of those who labour and die. Torture is the law of no world but the hell of human invention. It is doubtless overruled for the good of the tortured, but it will one day burn a hell in the hearts of the torturers.
Torture can be inflicted only by the superior. The divine idea of a superior is one who requires duty and protects, helps and delivers: our relation to the animals is that of their superiors in the family, who may require labour but are just and protective. Can they know anything of the Father who neither love nor rule their inferiors but use them as a child his insensate toys, pulling them to pieces to know what is inside? These so-called men of science lust to know as if a man’s life lay in knowing, as if ignorance were so vile that, for their hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with torture into the house of the innocent. They shall not thus find the way of understanding. He who loves knowledge most genuinely will most patiently wait until it can be had righteously.
Need I argue the injustice? Can a sentient creature come forth without rights, without claim to well-being or to consideration from the other creatures it finds present in space? If one answers, ‘For aught I know, it may be so,’ where then are your own rights? If another has none, yours must lie in your superior power; and will not a stronger than you one day come? May you not be in Naboth’s place, with an Ahab getting up to possess your vineyard, or a rich man coming after your little ewe lamb? That the animals’ rights are less than ours does not make them the less rights. They have little, and we have much; ought they therefore to have less and we more? Must we not rather be the more anxious that they have their little to the full? Every gain of injustice is a loss to the world, for life consists neither in length of days nor in ease of body. As to knowledge, let justice guide your search and you will know the sooner. Do the will of God, and you shall know God, and he will open your eyes to look into the heart of knowledge. Force your violent way and you gain knowledge only to miss truth: you may wound the heart of God, but you cannot rend it asunder to find the Truth enthroned there.
What man would he be who accepted the offer to be healed and kept alive by means that required the torture of certain animals? Would he feel himself a gentleman, walking the earth with his life upheld by the agonies of other lives?
‘I hope, sir, your health is better than it has been?’
‘Thank you, I am wonderfully restored; I have entered upon a fresh lease of life. My organism has been nourished with the agonies of several dogs and the pangs of a multitude of rabbits and guinea-pigs, and I am aware of a marvellous change for the better. They gave me their lives, and I gave them in return worse pains than mine. The bargain has proved quite satisfactory! They could not defend themselves, and had not a word to say. Poor fools! they were neither so wise nor so strong nor such lovers of comfort as I. Every animal for himself!’
There was a certain patriotic priest who thought it better to put a just man to death than that a whole nation should perish. Precious salvation that might be wrought by injustice! But the just man taught that the rich man and the beggar must one day change places.
‘To set the life of a dog against the life of a human being!’
No, but the torture of a dog against the prolonged life of a being capable of torturing him. Priceless gain, the lengthening of such a life, to the man and his friends and his country!
That the animals do not suffer so much as we should under like inflictions, I hope true, and think true. But is toothache nothing because there are worse pains for head and face?
Not a few who now regard themselves as benefactors of mankind will one day be looked on with a disapprobation no argument will now convince them they deserve; and another day is coming when they themselves will sorrowfully condemn their own deeds, for they are not stones but men, and must repent. Let them, in the interests of humanity, give their own entrails to the knife, their own silver cord to be laid bare, their own golden bowl to be watched throbbing, and I will worship at their feet. But shall I admire their discoveries at the expense of the stranger, nay, no stranger, the poor brother within their gates?
Your conscience does not trouble you? Take heed that the light in you be not darkness. Will it suffice you in that hour to say, ‘My burning desire to know how life wrought in him drove me through the gates and bars of his living house’? I doubt you will add, in your heart, ‘and I did well.’
To those who expect a world to come, I say: let us take heed how we carry ourselves toward the creation that is to share the world to come with us.
To those whose hearts are sore for that creation, I say: the Lord is mindful of his own, and will save both man and beast.
THE END.