The Bishop of Oxford and Prof. Ruskin on vivisection.

  • Mackarness, John Fielder, 1820-1889.
Date:
[1884]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Bishop of Oxford and Prof. Ruskin on vivisection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    It was so at the beginning of the Eoyal Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Animals, and many of them were old enough to remember it. No ridicule was too great to bo poured upon the heads of those who thought that any con- sideration whatever was due to those dumb creatures around them. (Hear, hear.) He was not going to multijdy instances, but to this very hour it had been so, that when men had tried to rescue the weak, to put down brutal sports, to restrain the liberty of wrong doing, they had been sneered at by the un- thinking and the inconsiderate as persons who had taken up some poor contemptible sentiment, and were trying to elevate it into a rule of action. They had tried to elevate it into a rule of action, or rather they had recognised that it was a rule of action, and needed no elevation of theirs, for it was the highest and noblest of principles. They only asserted it, and maintained it, and defended it, and they desired in this par- ticular case which their Society was connected with that the feeling of compassion, implanted by God in human hearts, should have its proper influence and sway, that it should have it there as well as in every department of human action in which it had already won its place. (Applause.) He stated at the beginning that he had only just this one thing to say, and he did not wish to add anything to it. He only desired to point out to them that what they were contending for was the great principle that ran through very large departments of human thought and action, and that what they were fighting for there, and in the meetings which would follow, was only that which they would have to fight for again and again in the face of a tendency which he watched with sadness everywhere to revert to earlier and more brutal methods against what he thought had been the glad and distinguishing mark of this generation—against the tendency to give all the weak their rights, and to introduce the principle of tender consideration into human feelings everywhere. Again and again in legisla- tion and elsewhere they had asserted the force of these principles, and they were told now, again and again, that the age had become childish, that they had, as one had said, grand-fatherly legislation. The sneers were endless. They were to lay aside all those principles, all those feelings, and go straightforward to the point, whatever it was, which the strong man desired to make, either for his own convenience, his own passions, or his mere contempt of the sensationalism,