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 illustrious 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 lustre 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 Mastership 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 illustrious
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 ignoble
attitude 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 damned with faint praise while
assured 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.