We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

Inge turns the usual religious moral gaze back onto humanity. By calling animals our “distant cousins,” he invokes evolutionary kinship to undercut human exceptionalism, then indicts the ways humans dominate and exploit other creatures (“enslaved,” “treated…so badly”). The hypothetical reversal—animals imagining the Devil “in human form”—is a satiric thought experiment meant to expose how normalised cruelty can look monstrous from the victim’s standpoint. The line also reflects a broader early-20th-century ethical unease about industrialised slaughter, sport hunting, and the instrumental treatment of animals, using theological language to sharpen a moral argument rather than to make a doctrinal claim.