If we

read our Bibles we find that over two hundred times the lower animals are mentioned, and each time in connection with man and with his life. We find regulations there bidding us be merciful to the ass at the plough and to the bird upon her nest; and when we come to our new Covenant, and when we read the words of Him who came into this world to pour a new current into its stagnating life, when we receive the truths which came from the incarnation we find immediately that some of the closest analogies that were drawn for our teaching were drawn from the lives and the habits of the lower animals. Our blessed Lord even compared Himself to a lamb and to the lion of the tribe of Judah. When He would impress upon us the necessity of responding to tenderly fatherly love as it was manifested in His own sinless, beautiful character, He can find no analogy more searching than that of the common hen caring for her chickens; and when He would speak a word of warning to me and to all other ministers when we are working in His name, he actually took an analogy from the lower animals, and from that particular branch of them which some people look upon with horror; for He told me that in my ministry I was to imitate a serpent-that I was to be "as wise as the serpent." I have often explained that to myself as meaning that in my ministry I am to imitate the way in which the serpent takes his prey, which is never by violence but always by fascination, and I think that sometimes if in our cloth we were to endeavour to make our message a little more fascinating, perhaps we should capture more souls for the great Master who loves us. Nevertheless I do say that everywhere our lives are intermingled, interpenetrated, as it were, with the lives of those we call the lower animals, and that ought naturally to make us more heedful of their interests than we are accustomed to be in our daily lives. We cannot get on without them; our bounden duty therefore is to protect them in every way, as they have not got the power of protecting themselves. We are protecting them, as I said, a little. We of the Victoria Street Anti-Vivisection Society are bound together in the determination to protect them against this one particular form of awful sin. I have no doubt that most of you in this room here pretend and profess to love the lower animals, but it is necessary for you to understand that your duty towards the lower animals is not fulfilled merely because you are fond of them and make pets of them. I heard of cases in the Southern States, some years ago, where men made great pets occasionally of particular negroes, and gave them every kind of privilege, and

made them almost a nuisance in their households; nevertheless they were exceedingly cruel to the rest of the negroes on their plantations. There are a great many ladies in society who will make a special pet of one particular dog or one particular parrot, or what not, and make it almost a nuisance in the house; but it is impossible to stir them to

anything like activity or energy on behalf of the race of the lower animals at large. It is not sufficient merely to care for your pets. It is something. I believe that the heart of every human being is widened and brightened by loving the lower animals. I believe that every. body is the better and not worse because they care even for one single pet. I have constantly quoted (and it always seems to me to be a very beautiful illustrative passage) those lines of Coleridge in the "Ancient Mariner," where he points out that the very first spark that entered into that deadened heart came there because he was melted at watching the gambols of some of the lower animals about him. You remember the lines:

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.' And the spring of love that gushed from his heart in caring for the lower animals broke the spell that bound him, and enabled him once more to be restored to his right position among human society. Therefore, it is a good thing only to care for the pets; it is the beginning; but it is not enough. Now we need a little courage to fight this battle. The fact of the matter is, we have so much dust thrown into our eyes. Unless we protect our eyes from the scientific dust that is thrown about, we are apt to get idle and careless and to satisfy ourselves that we are not able to do anything with regard to this great department of our duty. The dust that is thrown into our eyes is this. First they say, these experiments are of incalculable benefit to humanity. Now, I challenge the vivisectors-but who am I? I am not a professional man, and they will only laugh at me; but we have professional men who will challenge them and ask them publicly to tell us one single benefit to humanity that has ever arisen from vivisection. Can they remedy cancer, can they remedy any one of the great diseases to which human flesh is heir? Why, they cannot even remove the feverish cold that is tormenting me at this moment, for all their millions of vivisections. They have done practically nothing for us at all; so little indeed have they done for us, that we believe, on the contrary, that the human race, so far from being benefited, is put positively in jeopardy by the practice of vivisection. One of the greatest physicians who ever lived-he may not have been quite abreast of modern science as we now understand it, but when he was alive he was the leader of physicians-Sir Thomas Watson, told me himself, not long before he died, that young men had to unlearn at the bedside what they had learned in the laboratory. We have had proof over and over again of experiments that had been based upon conclusions drawn from large numbers of

brutal vivisections, which have absolutely failed when performed upon the human body. The experiment upon the leg, which was tried by Majendie, in Paris, after he had tortured countless dogs, was such a failure, that, in almost every case, if not in all the cases in which he tried it, he made the patient permanently lame for life. Therefore we are not being benefited by it. On the contrary, we believe that a dangerous empiricism is creeping into surgery as a kind of doom for the wicked. ness by which it has been learned. Hence for our own sakes, we are dead against this practice of vivisection. Now, when we know that at any rate we are justified in saying that the human race has been in no way bettered and no advantage has come to it from the practice of vivisection. But even if it were not so, should we not be justified in saying that we would have none of it? Even if by these abominable experiments they had discovered

something which was able to prolong a few lives of the superior race-the human raceshould we be justified in prolonging our lives at such a cost as that? I say I believe that this practice panders to the very lowest part of human nature, which is our selfishness engendered by fear. There is nothing on God's earth that is so brutally cruel as fear. And when they excite our terrors, and then pander to this fear that they have excited, and tell us that by the exhibition of a certain amount of necessary cruelty they will be able to relieve us, they are degrading the human race. And even if it were so, those of us who have learned something of the eternal issues around us, who believe in our divine sonship, who believe that this life is not all, but only the infant school for the life immortal, I hope they will have the courage to say: "I would rather suffer than that these animals should be made to suffer for me."

ueen.

SHAKESPEARE.

"I will try the forces

Of these thy compounds on such

creatures as

"The Princess; a Medley. "I could think he was one of those who could break their jests on the dead,

And mangle the living dog, that had loved him and fawn'd at his knee,

Drenched with the hellish oorali-that ever such things should be!"

In the Children's Hospital. The last time Miss Cobbe saw Lord Tennyson, he held her hand for a moment as she was quitting his luncheon table, and said, with his peculiar grave earnestness, alluding to her work in opposing vivisection :

"Go on! Fight the good fight, Miss Cobbe ! Fight the good fight !"

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. "If the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his own humanity. It is time that

a universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or the stone." The Idler. No 17.

JOHN RUSKIN.

"These scientific pursuits were now defiantly, provokingly, insultingly separated from the science of religion; they were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole creation from its Maker to the lowest creature."

Speech at Oxford, Dec. 9th, 1884.

DR. GEORGE MACDONALD. "The higher your motive for it, the greater is the blame of your unrighteousness. Must we congratulate you on such a love for your fellows as inspires you to wrong the weaker than they, those who are without helper against you? . . . It is the old story: the greed of knowing casts out Righteousness and Mercy and Faith. "Whatever believed benefit may or may not thus be wrought for higher creatures, the injustice to the lower is nowise affected." "The Hope of the Universe," Sunday Magazine, Nov., 1892.

THE LATE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY. "We are bound in duty, I think, to leap over all limitations, and go in for the total abolition of this vile and cruel form of idolatry, for idolatry it is, and like all idolatry, brutal, degrading, and deceptive."

Extract from a letter to Miss Cobbe. "No physical gain can possibly equal the injury caused by the moral degradation of the feelings which such barbarous experiments must naturally induce."

Speech in House of Lords, May 22nd, 1876. "The thought of this diabolical system disturbs me night and day. God remember Thy poor humble, useful creatures.

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Diary, Vol. III., p. 374.
CARDINAL MANNING.

"I take the first opportunity that has been offered to me to renew publicly my firm determination, so long as life is granted me, to assist in putting an end to that which I believe to be a detestable practice without scientific result, and immoral in itself. . . . I believe the time has come, and I only wish that we had the power, legally, to prohibit altogether the practice of vivisection. . . . Nothing Nothing can justify, no claim of science, no conjectural result, no hope for discovery, such horrors as these. Also, it must be remembered that whereas these torments, refined and indescribable, are certain, the result is altogether conjectural-everything about the result is uncertain but the certain infraction of the first laws of mercy and humanity. I love my country and my countrymen, but I will not confide in the notion that that which is practised abroad has not been and cannot be practised in our midst; and if I thought that there was at this moment a comparative exemption in England, I would say, 'Let us take care that there shall never be the re-action of the Continent on this country, for it is true and certain that whatever is done abroad within a little while is done among ourselves, unless we render it impossible that it should be done.'

Speech, June 21st, 1882.

THE BISHOP OF DURHAM. "If He who made us made all other creatures also, and if they find a place in His providential plan, if His tender mercies reach to them, and this we Christians most certainly believe-then I find it absolutely inconceivable that He should have so arranged the avenues of knowledge, that we can attain to truths, which it is His will that we should master, only through the unutterable agonies of beings which trust in us."

Sermon in Westminster Abbey, August 18th, 1889. THE LATE BISHOP OF OXFORD. (DR. MACKARNESS).

"Depend upon it other avenues of knowledge will be open to you for the discoveries you desire to make. God in his good time will give you these avenues; but for my part I would rather that they should not be discovered

at all, than that they should be brought about by the sacrifice altogether of the finer feeling of compassion, which should be treasured as a priceless jewel. Do your duty to the beast, and depend upon it you will be doing your duty to man." Speech, May 1st, 1883.

To

BISHOP BARRY, D.D., D.C.L. Canon of Windsor, late Primate of Australia. "For humanity at large, to seek its own supposed good at all hazard of wrong-doing and cruelty to the weaker creatures of God, is surely of the very essence of selfishness. hold that the increase of physical comfort, the removal of physical pain, the prolongation of physical life, are the supreme objects, for the sake of which we may demoralize our higher humanity, is simply a worship of the flesh, unworthy of a true man, impossible to a true Christian. To sin for these purposes against God's creatures, bound up with ourselves in the great chain of organic being, and committed to us as made in His image, and having a delegation of His sovereignty, is a prostitution of God-given power, which is almost a sacrilege." Paper read at the Church Congress at Folkestone, 1892.

ROBERT BROWNING.

"I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two. I return the paper, because I shall be probably shut up here for the next week or more, and prevented from seeing my friends. Whoever would refuse to sign would certainly not be of the number." From a Letter to Miss Cobbe, Dec. 28th, 1874.

JAMES MARTINEAU, D.D.

"I should have been very sorry not to join in the protest against this hideous offence. The simultaneous loss from the morals of our 'advanced' scientific men of all reverent senti. ment towards beings above them as towards beings below, is a curious and instructive phenomenon highly significant of the process which their natures are undergoing at both ends."

From a Letter dated Jan. 5th, 1875.

THE BISHOP OF MANCHESTER.
(DR. MOORHOUSE).

"If a man could hear with cold and callous heart the cry of the poor dog which was suffering tortures caused and continued by the experimenter, that man must become more hard and brutal in character. He was gaining his knowledge by the degradation of his moral character. If such a man urged the selfish plea, I am torturing the lower creatures for the advantage of man,' he (the Bishop) replied by asking: Who gave him the right to do any such thing? He doubted whether any such advantage were to be obtained; but even if it were, he deprecated the attempt to obtain it, because He who made the poor creatures

capable of suffering made them so in order that they might be capable of happiness, and for his part he (the Bishop) unhesitatingly answered that he would rather die a hundred times than save his life by such infernal experiments. Those things were wholly unlawful. They degraded the mind of the experimenter, they tortured God's innocent creatures, they were totally contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, and they were Pagan in their conception and in their execution."

Extract from Sermon preached in Manchester Cathedral, September 27th, 1891.

THE LATE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER. (DR. HAROLD BROWNE).

N the recently published "Life of St. Benedict," by Abbot Forte, O.S.B., writes a Catholic correspondent, the reverend author is in hearty sympathy with animal lovers. The following extract from this interesting biography (pp. 66, 67) will convince your readers that the saints of the Catholic Church did not hold the views expressed in a well-known volume of Jesuit theology::

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Men like St. Benedict, always intent on the love of the Creator, could not withhold their love from the things which He had created. Hence they felt themselves bound by the bonds of paternal love with everything in God's universe.

"On the other hand, the irrational animals, by divine ordination, often gave their services to those holy men who, in the desert, far from human society, committed their lives into the hands of God alone. Wherefore, though defenceless and solitary, they never died from the violence of wild beasts; indeed, we find, in the lives of the Fathers of the desert a crow bringing bread to St. Paul, the first hermit, and two lions coming forth from the depths of the solitude, to dig a grave in which St. Anthony

might bury him. And in this outpouring of love for all irrational creatures, St. Francis I called the birds his brethren, and even the wolf his brother. The love, therefore, of holy men for the 'irrational creatures is a consequence of that which they have for God, who called them out of nothing and preserves them in life. Indeed, in that lyric outpouring of the mind to the Lord in Psalm cxlviii., David praises Him for His creative omnipotence, and calls upon, not only men, but even the beasts, to join him in his song; and he gives the reason-"Quia ipse dixit et factor sunt, ipse mandavit et creator sunt." Add to this, in the last place, that the sin of the first man, as it separated him by rebellion from God, so did it separate from himself by rebellion, the irrational animals, which were subject to God. Those men, who by special penance and purity have turned to God, have frequently by extraordinary divine permission, acquired again their empire over the beasts; and these rendered mild by the virtues of the saints, have returned to their former subjection. This I say to whoever yet believes in the truth of the Bible."

George du Maurier on Sport.-" After this he (an uncle who wanted to train him into a sportsman) never took me out shooting with him again; and indeed I had discovered to my discomfiture, that I, the admirer and would-be emulator of Natto Bumpo, the deer slayer; I, the familiar of the last of the Mohicans and his scalp lifting father, could not bear the sight of bloodleast of all blood shed by myself and for my own amusement. The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so. As I picked it off the

find

ground, and felt its poor little warm, narrow chest, and the last beat of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame and remorse, and settled with myself that I would some other road to English gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life seems so well worth living. I must eat them, I suppose; but I would never shoot them any more; my hands, at least, should be clean of blood henceforward." (Peter Ibbetson.) The above passage is so clearly autobiographical, as indeed is so much of Peter Ibbetson, that we may accept it as the late Mr. du Maurier's judgment on sport.