We here, in a cultivated country, are slow to take in this thought.  We have not here, as in India, Africa, America, lion and tiger, bear and wolf, jaguar and puma, perpetually prowling round the farms, and taking their tithe of our sheep and cattle.  We have never heard, as the Psalmist had, the roar of the lion round the village at night, or seen all the animals, down to the very dogs, crowding together in terror, knowing but too well what that roar meant.  If we had; and had been like the Psalmist, thoughtful men:  then it would have been a very solemn question to us—­From whom the lion was asking for his nightly meal; whether from God, or from some devil as cruel as himself?

But even here the same slaughter of animals by animals goes on.  The hawk feeds on the small birds, the small birds on the insects, the insects, many of them, on each other.  Even our most delicate and seemingly harmless songsters, like the nightingale, feed entirely on living creatures—­each one of which, however small, has cost God as much pains—­if I may so speak in all reverence—­to make as the nightingale itself; and thus, from the top to the bottom of creation, is one chain of destruction, and pain, and death.

What is the meaning of it all?  Ought it to be so, or ought it not?  Is it God’s will and law, or is it not?  That is a solemn question; and one which has tried many a thoughtful, and tender, and virtuous soul ere now, both Christian and heathen; and has driven them to find strange answers to it, which have been, often enough, not according to Scripture, or to the Catholic Faith.

Some used to say, in old times; and they may say again—­This world, so full of pain and death, is a very ill-made world.  We will not believe that it was made by the good God.  It must have been made by some evil being, or at least by some stupid and clumsy being—­the Demiurgus, they called him—­or the world-maker—­some inferior God, whom the good God would conquer and depose, and so do away with pain, and misery, and death.  A pardonable mistake:  but, as we are bound to believe, a mistake nevertheless.

Others, again, good Christians and good men likewise, have invented another answer to the mystery—­like that which Milton gives in his ‘Paradise Lost.’  They have said—­Before Adam fell there was no pain or death in the world.  It was only after Adam’s fall that the animals began to destroy and devour each other.  Ever since then there has been a curse on the earth, and this is one of the fruits thereof.

Now I say distinctly, as I have said elsewhere, that we are not bound to believe this or anything like it.  The book of Genesis does not say that the animals began to devour each other at Adam’s fall.  It does not even say that the ground is cursed for man’s sake now, much less the animals.  For we read in Genesis ix. 21—­“And the Lord said, I will not any more curse the ground for man’s sake.”  Neither do the Psalmists and Prophets give the least hint of any such doctrine.  Surely, if we found it anywhere, we should find it in this very 104th Psalm, and somewhere near the very verse which I have taken for my text.  But this Psalm gives no hint of it.  So far from saying that God has cursed His own works, or looks on them as cursed:  it says—­“The Lord shall rejoice in His works.”