was never known to bite a human being. The dogs that delight to bark and bite are now out of the ring, although the excellent Watts has assured us that "God hath made them so," and for a purpose we know that some worthy watch dogs have turned to good account. Science even justifies Dr. Watts in saying, “Let bears and lions growl and fight; for it is their nature to," and the great law of the survival of the fittest is conserved thereby. Nevertheless, in the fond efforts to fit them out with human virtues pet bears and other wild animals are often taken into family circles or naturalists' camps, and then summarily executed when they eat up the small children within reach, though it is their nature to. Even dogs and cats suffer no end of violence through being expected to live up to the human standard of domestic virtues, to say nothing of the violence they inflict on their teachers. An Irish setter that had been extravagantly petted by its mistress recently undertook to drown a new baby that was supplanting him in her affections, and was promptly shot by his owner for his misguided affection.

To live out its true nature, to fulfill the ends of its own being, which Spinoza makes the highest virtue of dogs or men, is clearly not one which the new animal theories are prepared to accept and if the soul of our grandam did inhabit a wild fowl, it is expected to show itself superior to us by carrying all the virtues of our higher incarnation into its low estate. But nature knows better, and perhaps when a few more babies are sacrificed to Irish setters, or beautiful women, like Miss Elizabeth Mayland, of Yorkshire fame, sent to nunneries through the lacerations of jealous collies, the place of our dumb relations in the scale of being will be more safely adjusted, and babies and poodles not so embarrassingly mixed in human homes and sympathies. The recent story of a gallant fireman carrying out a pet poodle

in its blankets and pillows from a burning mansion in the brave hope that he was rescuing the heir of the family, is a good companion-piece to the flowery obsequies of the late lamented Pluto.

The waste of sentiment upon beasts and all creeping things while everywhere humanity is starving for it, is one of the edifying spectacles of our modern civilization, and only equaled by the irony of the animal's sublimely indifferent attitude toward it. One of the truest animal lovers of the land, touching their best estate, writes: "Not one of them is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth," and clearly he deems it enough for man to bear the weight of unhappy respectability without trying to fit the free animal kingdom to it. Society may be, as the duchess of Bedford deems it, a kind of zoo, but, even so, each beast after his own kind was the order of creation, and science has not yet found the missing link that quite unites the human and animal zoo. That it discerns in all shapes of animal life “a form of the same great power that quickens us also," is the real ground of the respect it demands of us for every living thing. In the light of this high truth it does indeed become a serious matter to set foot upon a worm. Nevertheless, it is no pleasanter now than in Job's day to say to the worm, "Thou art my mother and my sister."

PROPHETS AND DISCIPLES

HERE is always danger of a Saul among the prophets.

Worse still, the possibility of falling into the hands of lying prophets. But when a great seer declares his limitations and avers that it is only the ignorant who have confidence in him he really ought to awaken a better confidence in all hearers. It is one of the prime truths in the line of the psychic that only they who are ignorant turn to the outside prophet. They who are not ignorant look within. "The mystic," says a recent speaker, "is he who beholds things from his viewpoint of the unseen, and he is always a plagiarist because of necessity he builds that unseen from the images and material of the seen." To what end therefore should Maeterlinck, Whitman, Blake or any other seer or mystic undertake to shape the spirit world for the man who can think for himself, or resolve the secret of spirit power save to those who have never learned it for themselves? It is the ignorant, of course, who turn to them for light and commonly, too, it is the ignorant who abuse them for the unsatisfying character of that light.

The main difficulty in this field is from an army of "disappointed and ignorant disciples" who expect from every new prophet or explorer who arises in it something that he is in nowise competent to furnish them, and that is the life touch that shall open their eyes. Not until man knows himself as a part of the unseen world is it any use to paint the imagery and mastery of it to his bewildered mind. The utmost that any poet, prophet, teacher or preacher can do,

is to "play upon the latent infinity within us," as Stanley Lee expresses it, and help us find that larger self that knits us to the unseen, the universal. Why then should any rational creature run after sage or mystic to instruct him instead of sitting down under his own bo-tree and making it all out for himself? Or better still, walking his own straightforward, fearless way into the open door of the kingdom that has never been denied him?

There is no question, of course, that there are great and infallible psychic laws whereby the mastery of the spirit forces may be laid hold of. But the beauty of this truth is, that the humblest peasant appears to have been as successful as the subtlest philosopher in finding them out, or, at least, in living them out, with no concern about defining them. Indeed, the majority of people who live bravely and decently their troublous lives are entirely in the line of them, and the tremendous metaphysical, theosophical and occult systems and teachings that are built around them serve ofttimes only to bewilder and perplex the "ignorant,” but selftaught "disciple." It is like the professor's wife who had no trouble in sewing on a button till her inquiring husband said, “My dear, how do you manage to hit the hole instead of the button? I never could do it." Then for the first time she broke her needle in seeking the hole, and replied merely, "Well, since you have called my attention to it, I can't either."

Before man began to speculate much about the laws and principles that knit him to his creator he sat placidly in tent doors or beside still waters communing with God and his angels on all the affairs of life. But when there came priests and rites and cumbrous systems the veil of the temple rose between him and his God, and not even the coming of the human Christ has thoroughly rent it asunder. Never

theless the intervention of all creatures was rejected by him. "Go into your closet and when you have shut your door commune with your Father, who is in secret, and your Father who seeth in secret shall reward you openly." That is all there is of it. Don't ask Maeterlinck, or Blake, or sage or mystic of any school, how you shall reach the invisible. Talk to God for yourself and establish your own connection. "All that God is," says Nash, "he puts in pledge for your perfecting," and there is nothing for man to do but claim the benefit of that pledge. The foundation of that grand principle of human brotherhood which now runs through every branch of philosophy, sociology or religion is, of course, the great truth that every man has God for his Father and can approach him in the full confidence of a child at any moment.

The new platonic mysticism which Plotinus well characterizes as "half a swoon and half an ecstasy" still pours its subjective stream into much of the teaching on this subject, so that nothing short of a trance or an epileptic fit seems equal to reducing man to that etherealized condition held necessary for the sacred communication. Even the sanest of the modern mystics tell us that much inner knowledge and deep experience must have been acquired to open to us this spirit connection. But consider, in the weight of all this, the simplicity of that open-air call of the Lord to the man in the sycamore tree, "Zacchaeus, come down, for this day I must abide at thy house."

"God has most to give us in the common things of life," says a writer of to-day, and one of but yesterday declares, "God must have loved the common people best-he made so many of them." Is it conceivable, then, that only to a few ecstatic dreamers, or even sage psychologists, he would have left the secret of that tie that binds man to himself, instead