Great Testimony Part 4

CHAPTER X: CARDINAL NEWMAN

[Picture: Cardinal Newman. From the portrait by Jane Fortescue, Lady Coleridge]

It is difficult perhaps for students of the younger generation to realise the immense influence exercised among his contemporaries by Cardinal Newman, nor will a study of his writings adequately explain it to them.

He has hardly survived as a standard author, though he wrote a pure and lucid prose. Those who leave the bulk of their literary work behind them in the form of sermons are inviting the world to neglect it.

Moreover, though he was a past master of controversy, the arena in which he fought with such doughty prowess amid the excited plaudits and dehortations of vast a.s.semblies is now left solitary in echoing emptiness, and the crowds of to-day have pa.s.sed away to abet the combatants, on one side or the other, in very different fields of tourney.

Here and there his writing ascends to a fine note of eloquence, as in his great exclamatory pa.s.sage on music that begins thus:--

There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen: yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world!

But all his writings, religious and controversial, will not explain the immense and dominating effect Newman produced upon his contemporaries.

That effect was due to the irresistible magic of his personality. He was manifestly one of the Saints of G.o.d, and his presence brought with it into any company a sense of mighty power gloved in stainless humility.

Though habitually bearing an aspect of wistful gentleness, his entry into a room crowded with distinguished people made them all seem to be something less than they were before his arrival.

A man of such a character commands by his visible presence, and those who have not felt the spell of it do not comprehend the cause of his authoritative influence among those who have.

The teaching of Newman on the great question of man's relation to the sentient creatures placed in his power in the world, must come to us with all the weight that is implicit in the utterance of one of such unquestioned sanct.i.ty.

It would be difficult in all his voluminous works to discover anything more touching and moving than his reference to the sufferings of animals, who as he says "have done no harm," which is embedded in the seventh volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons:--

First, as to these sufferings, you will observe that our Lord is called a Lamb in the text; that is, He was as defenceless and as innocent as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may, without presumption or irreverence, take the image as a means of conveying to our minds those feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I mean, consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it not sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some chance publication which we take up? At one time it is the wanton deed of barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of burden; and at another it is the cold-blooded and calculating act of men of science, who make experiments on brute animals, perhaps merely from a sort of curiosity.

I do not like to go into particulars, for many reasons, but one of those instances which we read of as happening in this day, and which seems more shocking than the rest, is when the poor dumb victim is fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out its life. Now, do you not see that I have a reason for saying this, and am not using these distressing words for nothing? For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord? He was gashed with the scourge, pierced through hands and feet, and so fastened to the Cross, and there left, and that as a spectacle. Now, what is it moves our very hearts and sickens us so much as cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. For instance, if they were dangerous animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike to hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very different kind, but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it.

Let us listen with all our hearts to this beautiful appeal. Let us reverence the saintly man who made it, and who still speaks to us out of the past. Let us remember that Knowledge and the search for it may often be cruel, but that Wisdom and those who follow it are always merciful.

CHAPTER XI: THREE GREAT CHURCHMEN

I have already recorded in these pages the strenuous opposition to vivisection displayed by the two greatest representatives of the Church of Rome that arose in England in the last century; and to all who adhere to that Church the authority of the two ill.u.s.trious Cardinals Newman and Manning must be decisive.

The most famous dignitaries of the English Church in the great Victorian age were also as firm in their condemnation of vivisection as were the great Cardinals.

When I was a young man Dean Stanley was the Dean of Westminster, Dean Vaughan was the Master of the Temple, and Liddon Canon of St. Paul's.

These were all men of world-wide distinction. They were men who adorned and made splendid the offices and dignities they occupied, their names were familiar in every corner of the land, they lent a l.u.s.tre to the Church of England, and each of them utterly condemned vivisection.

In these present times only a few people in the metropolis, and hardly anybody out of it, can tell without consulting some book of reference who may be the estimable persons who to-day fill the Deanery of Westminster and the Masters.h.i.+p of the Temple, nor has Canon Liddon any successor that the world acclaims, and I can vouch for it that none of them has ever extended to us a helping hand or publicly condemned the torture of animals for scientific purposes.

It is always the loftiest names in literature and the most ill.u.s.trious authorities on ethics that are found ranged against the infliction of suffering upon helpless animals for the enlargement of human knowledge.

Those who support such inflictions are never in the first rank of literature, art, or moral teaching. Dean Stanley left behind him a reputation incomparably greater than any occupier of his Deanery that has succeeded him. The same must be conceded to Dean Vaughan at the Temple; and the eloquence of Canon Liddon compelled the absorbed attention of such congregations as are not now collected by the Canons that have followed him. As far as I am aware, none of the successors of these great men have ever helped our cause at all.

No doubt whenever there shall arise in the ministry of the Church of England men of the commanding power, distinguished character, and potent speech that these great men of the last generation displayed we shall find them also espousing the cause of the helpless vivisected animals; in the meanwhile the occupiers of the most dignified positions in the Established Church seem to have drifted into the somewhat ign.o.ble att.i.tude of avoiding the disagreeable subject of vivisection altogether.

When we invite them to help us we receive either no reply at all, or a reply that is carefully evasive, or we are d.a.m.ned with faint praise while a.s.sured that the writer is too busy to give the subject the attention it needs before any public utterance is possible upon it. All of which methods of dealing with the matter display much wisdom of the world and a very human desire to avoid controversy and other uncomfortable mental and epistolary disturbance, but none of the spirit that led Archbishop Temple when he was Bishop of Exeter to stand unflinching on a temperance platform while the publicans pelted him with flour.

CHAPTER XII: QUEEN VICTORIA

Queen Victoria has given her name to a period which has no parallel in magnificence since the days of the great Elizabeth.

The galaxy of great poets, teachers, and philosophers that flourished in the Victorian age cannot be matched in any similar series of years in all the history of the modern world.

With her departure exhaustion seems to have come upon the world of letters for a time, and to the cla.s.sic glories of the nineteenth century there has succeeded an usurpation of journalists without the splendour of genius or even the distinction of scholars.h.i.+p.

And although we may perhaps recognise in Lord Beaconsfield's inclusive use of the phrase to her of "we authors, Madam" something of the flattery of the courtier, yet a.s.suredly in all her public addresses to her people there is displayed a fine and biblical simplicity, and a directness of appeal indicative of a n.o.ble mind and a great heart.

The most penetrating criticism will fail to discover a fault either of taste or diction or intent in any of these utterances. They combine the dignity appropriate to the words of the greatest Sovereign of the World, with the intimate friendliness that proceeds from the wellsprings of a sweet woman's heart.

Worthily then did she reign over the most splendid times of our history.

That she should from the day she ascended the throne to the day of her death forward and abet all the enlargements of the spirit of mercy and pity towards the suffering, whether among man or animals, was inevitable in a nature so benevolent. And it may very well be that in far distant times the rise of humaneness to man and beast will be regarded as one of the n.o.blest characteristics of her reign.

Her position above controversies precluded her from partic.i.p.ating in them, and made it difficult if not impossible for her publicly to espouse the cause of the miserable creatures subjected to nameless sufferings in the laboratories of the scientific. But her sympathy with those who strove and still strive to end those sufferings could not always be concealed, and on a memorable occasion she expressed her concurrence in the efforts of those who desired to see the laws sanctioning such suffering totally abolished and repealed.

Very fitting therefore it is that among those who earnestly condemned vivisection we should include the august name and fame of Queen Victoria.

CHAPTER XIII: COMPa.s.sED ABOUT WITH SO GREAT A CLOUD OF WITNESSES

Among the eminent men and women of England whose names are not to be regarded as world famous in the sense that applies to those dealt with in the foregoing chapters, but who nevertheless in their place and time were recognised by their contemporaries and are still recognised by those now living as persons of authority and ability, there can be cited a distinguished array who consistently condemned vivisection as permitted and as practised in this country as immoral. Among religious leaders may be enumerated the following:--

Archbishop McEvilly, of Tuam; Archbishop Crozier, Primate of Ireland; Archbishop Bagshawe; Bishop Westcott, of Durham; Bishop Moule, of Durham; Bishop Harold Browne, of Winchester; Bishop Lord Arthur Hervey, of Bath and Wells; Bishop Ryle, of Liverpool; Bishop Walsham How, of Wakefield; Bishop Ridding, of Southwell; Bishop Moorhouse, of Manchester; Bishop Mackarness, of Oxford; Bishop Chinnery-Haldane, of Argyll and the Isles; Bishop Barry, Primate of Australia; Dean Kichten. Archdeacon Wilberforce; Father Ignatius; General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army; Spurgeon; Hugh Price Hughes; Newman Hall; James Martineau; Stopford Brooke.

Among prominent teachers and scholars and philosophers and writers and artists and lawyers I find the following:--

Alfred Russel Wallace, Freeman, Froude, Leslie Stephen, Richard Holt Hutton, Sir Henry Taylor, Sir Lewis Morris, George Macdonald, Blackmore, Wilkie Collins, "Lewis Carroll," Robert Buchanan, Justin McCarthy, Sir Arthur Arnold, Mrs. Somerville, Julia Wedgwood, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Sir Henry Irving, Lord Brampton (Mr. Justice Hawkins), and Lord Chief Baron Kelly.

I have made no research for great names in foreign countries, but some of the most ill.u.s.trious stand prominently before the world representing the three greatest continental races:

Victor Hugo, Wagner, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Rousseau.

Here then I have brought together a very glorious company justifying the t.i.tle I have affixed to this book.