The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day, at going out for a walk down the same road.

The modern world is full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally accompanied with human sacrifice.

Yet we hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence of all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin.
I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the old road as a new road.

But I cannot claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces.

It is in this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation.
And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation.
His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret.
He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk, but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of Scripture.
My own beast of burden supports the authority of Scripture by being a very wild ass.