Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless “beasts,” has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.
I knew a Catholic priest, of high repute, who excused the Spanish bull-fight on the plea that it forms a safety-valve for men’s savage instincts; their barbarity goes out on the bull, and leaves them gentle and kindly in their domestic relations. It is, in fact, the story of the scape-goat repeated; only the victim is not a goat, and he does not escape. Everywhere among the religious, except in a few individuals, one meets the persistent disbelief in the kinship of all sentient life: it is the religious, not the heretics, who are the true infidels and unbelievers. A few years ago the Bishop of Oxford refused to sanction a prayer for the animals, because “it has never been the custom of the Church to pray for any other beings than those we think of as rational.”
I was told by the Rev. G. Ouseley, an old man whose heart and soul were in the work of alleviating the wrongs of animals, that he once approached all the ministers of religion in a large town on the south coast, in the hope of inducing them to discountenance the cruel treatment of cats. He met with little encouragement; and one of the parsons on whom he called, the most influential in the place, bluntly ridiculed the proposal. “One can’t chuck a cat across the room,” he said, “without some old woman making a fuss about it.” Mr. Ouseley’s only comment, when he repeated this remark, was: “A Christian clergyman!”
The following is an extract from a letter written at Jerusalem by my friend Mr. Philip G. Peabody, who has travelled very widely, and has been a most careful observer of the treatment accorded to animals, especially to horses, in the various countries visited by him:
“When I reflect that for centuries, and from all parts of the world, the most earnest Christians have been coming here, and are still coming; that often they remain here until they die; that scores of great churches here are crowded with pious thousands; and that not one human being of them, so far as I can see or can learn, has the slightest regard for the cruelties occurring hundreds of times daily, so atrocious that the most heartless ruffian in Boston would indignantly protest against them—what am I to think of the value of Christianity to make men good, tender, and kind?”
This opinion would seem to be corroborated by that of Dean Inge, who has described Man as “a bloodthirsty savage, not much changed since the first Stone Age.” Unfortunately, the Gloomy Dean, whose oracular utterances are so valued by journalists as providing excellent material for “copy,” does not himself extend any sympathy to those who are endeavouring to mitigate the savageness which he deplores, and which his religion has failed to amend.
Perhaps no better test of a people’s civilization could be found than in the manner of their religious festivals. What of our Christmas—the season when peace and goodwill take the form of a general massacre followed by a general gormandizing, with results not much less fatal to the merry-makers than to their victims? One would think that a decent cannibal would be sickened by the shows of live cattle, fattened for the knife, and thousands of ghastly carcases hung in the butchers’ shops; but, on the contrary, the spectacle is everywhere regarded as a genial and festive one. The protests which the Humanitarian League used to make, in letters to ministers of religion and other persons of influence, met with hardly any response; sometimes a press-writer would piously vindicate the sacred season, as “Dagonet” once did in the Referee: “We are, of course, from a certain point of view, barbarians in our butchery of beasts for the banquet. The spectacle of headless animals hanging on hooks and dripping with blood is not æsthetic. But Nature is barbarous in her methods, and it is a law of Nature that one set of live things should live upon another set of live things. To kill and eat is a natural instinct. To denounce it as inhuman is not only absurd, but in a sense impious.” Piety and pole-axe, it will be seen, go together, in the celebration of the Christian Saturnalia.
Christmas comes but once a year:
Let this our anguish soften!
For who could bide that season drear
Of bogus mirth and gory cheer,
If it came more often?
From Religion, then, as such, the League expected nothing and got nothing; but it must be owned that its failure to obtain any substantial help from the Labour movement was something of a disappointment; for though not a few leaders, men such as Keir Hardie, J. R. Clynes, J. R. Macdonald, Bruce Glasier, and George Lansbury, were good friends to our cause, the party, as a whole, showed little interest in the reforms which we advocated, even in matters which specially concerned the working classes, such as the Vagrancy Act, the Game Laws, and the use of the cane in Board Schools. As for the non-humans, it is a curious fact that while the National Secular Society includes among its immediate practical objects a more humane treatment of animals, and their legal protection against cruelty, the Labour movement, like the Churches, has not cared to widen its outlook even to the extent of demanding better conditions for the more highly organized domestic animals.