Has man, then, no real pre-eminence over the beast? Apparently, if we grant the assumption of the Epicurean, this is the conclusion to which we must come. If man have merely an animal existence, if he have no relations to a spiritual world, if when he dies he perishes, then in what respects is he better than the beasts?
I. To this it may be replied by pointing to man's intellectual and moral endowments as conferring upon him an undeniable superiority over the brutes. There is no need to deny or question the worth and preciousness of the qualities which man thus possesses. But the more costly a machine is, so much the more is it an evil if it fail of the end for which it has been constructed. In such a case we are ready to mourn over the useless expenditure, the misapplied ingenuity, the worse than wasted power, which such a splendid failure exhibits, and are constrained to say, Whatever may be the apparent superiority of this structure over the humbler structures by its side, in which no such deficiency or failure appears, in reality the latter is to be preferred to the former; the latter, to all intents and purposes, is better than the former. It is just to such a conclusion that we shall be forced to come concerning man if we leave out of view his spiritual relations, his relations to God and to a future state of being. If we confine our view of man to his mere earthly state and animal being, what can we make of it but that he is a great mistake, a contrivance that cannot obey its master-power without frustrating the very end for which that power was placed in mastery over it? so that it would seem as if it would have been better for him to have been made as the sheep or the ox, that have no understanding, than to be endowed as he is only to be less happy and less orderly than they.
II. From so gloomy and so revolting a conclusion there seems to be but one way of escape, and that is by assuming that man's earthly being is not his whole being or the most important part of it. Man's real dignity and supremacy lies in this, that he is made for immortality; that he is capacious of the Divine; that he has relations to the infinite and the eternal; that his present state is but the vestibule of his being; and that when his journey through this toilsome and hazardous waste of earth shall have been accomplished he shall, provided he have worthily achieved his probation, reach the proper home and resting-place of his spirit in heaven.
W. Lindsay Alexander, Sermons,p. 238.
References: Ecclesiastes 3:16-22. T. C. Finlayson, A Practical Exposition of Ecclesiastes,p. 87. Ecclesiastes 3:18 -iv. 4. J. H. Cooke, The Preacher's Pilgrimage,p. 44.Ecclesiastes 3:22. J. F. Stevenson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 296. 3 C. Bridges, An Exposition of Ecclesiastes,p. 48; G. G. Bradley, Lectures on Ecclesiastes,p. 66.