Fred. E. Pirkis and Mrs. Pirkis
R. Ll. Price
Evelyn Price
R. M. Price
Lester Reed
Ellen Elcum Rees
J. Herbert Satchell
Mark Thornhill, J.P.
Looking back on this long struggle of twenty years, in which so much of my happiness and the happiness of others dearer than myself, has been engulfed, I can see that, starting from the apparently small and subordinate question of Scientific Cruelty, the controversy has been growing and widening till the whole department of ethics dealing with man’s relation to the lower animals has gradually been included in it. That this department is an obscure one, and that neither the Christian Churches nor yet philosophic moralists have hitherto paid it sufficient attention, is now admitted. That it is time that it should be carefully studied and worked out, is also clear.
Sometimes I have thought (as by a law of our being we seem driven to do whenever our hearts are deeply concerned) that a Divine guidance may have presided over all the heart-breaking delays and disappointments of this weary movement; and that it has not been allowed to terminate, as it would certainly have done, had we carried our Bill of 1876 in its original form through Parliament. Then our Society would have dissolved at once; and, after a time, perhaps, the Act, however well designed, would have become more or less a dead letter; and the hydra-heads of Vivisection would have reared themselves once more. But, as it has actually happened, the delay and failure of our earlier efforts and our consequent persistence in them, have fixed attention on this culminating sin against the lower animals, and through it on all other sins against them. A great revision of opinion on the subject is undoubtedly taking place; and while some (especially Roman Catholic) Zoophilists have diligently sought in decrees and manuals and treatises of casuistry for some authority defining Cruelty to animals to be a Sin, the poverty of the results of all such investigations, and of the anxious collation of Biblical texts by Protestants, is gradually revealing the fact that, in this whole department of human duty, we must look to the God-enlightened consciences of living men rather than to the dicta of departed saints, or casuists, whose attention was directed exclusively to the relations of human beings with each other and with God, and who obviously never contemplated those which we hold to the brutes with adequate seriousness,—if at all. Of course we are here met, just as the first anti-Slavery apostles were met, and as the advocates of every fresh development of morality will be met for many a day to come, by the fundamental fallacy of the Christian Churches (in that respect resembling Islam) that there is a finality in Divine teaching, and that they have been for two thousand years in possession of the last word of God to man. Protestants are certainly not bound in any way to occupy such a position, or to assume that a final revise has ever been issued, or ever will be issued by Divine authority, of a Whole Duty of Man. Rather are they called on piously and gratefully to look for fresh light to come down, age after age, from the Father of lights: or (if they please rather so to consider it) further development of the Christian Spirit to be manifested as men learn better to incarnate it in their minds and lives. As for Theists like myself, it is natural for us and in accordance with all our opinions, to believe that such a movement as is now taking place over the civilised world on behalf of dumb animals, is a fresh Divine impulse of Mercy, stirring in thousands of human hearts, and deserving of reverent cherishing and thankful acceptance.