his works without recognising a moral grandeur in him that far out-tops the very human flaws that may even serve to make him more penetrative to our own imperfect hearts.

There seems to be a law that compels all

the truly great men of letters, from Shakespeare and Johnson down to our own day, to abhor the torture of animals for our supposed benefit, and to that law Thomas Carlyle starkly adhered.

CHAPTER IX: TENNYSON
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

Tennyson, as was inevitable with a man of such nobility of mind and life, regarded the torture of animals for the sake of knowledge with “the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn.”

If authority be cited in great moral questions here is one that must compel reverence from all but the poor trifler with his “hollow smile and frozen sneer.”

He looked modern Science in the eye, perceived whither its aggrandisement of knowledge to a place supreme in human estimate, above conduct, must inevitably lead mankind, and proclaimed, in accents which can never die, that it is impossible for man to acquiesce in a godless world.

He taught us that men’s hearts can never

be satisfied with a world explained and comprised by the cold “changeless law” of foreordained evolution and inevitable destiny.  “Knowledge comes,” said he, “but wisdom lingers.”

From the first, then, Tennyson lent the weight of his splendid name to the cause of mercy, and I find his signature to the original great petition for the restriction of vivisection between those of Leslie Stephen and Robert Browning on the same sheet of paper—a sheet of paper now one of the treasured possessions of the National Anti-Vivisection Society.

All the world knows the allusions in his works to those who “carve the living hound,” and to curare, which he called “the hellish oorali.”  And thus this greatest poet of the Victorian age gave the weight of his commanding authority for all time to a fierce condemnation of vivisection as the most awful and monstrous of the offsprings of modern Science.

Tennyson was religious in the widest and most inspiring sense.

“Almost the finest summing up of religion,” he wrote, “is ‘to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.’”

“To love mercy!”  That is the true sign of magnanimity in man.  All holy men, all brave men, all great and knightly men have loved mercy.  “It is an attribute to God Himself.”

Time passes, and succeeding races of mankind, like the leaves of autumn, are blown away and perish, but countless men of heroic mould, reaching back into the dim mists of legend and down through innumerable years while the great world spins “for ever down the ringing grooves of change,” have one and all been gloriously crowned with the same shining diadem of mercy.

CHAPTER X: CARDINAL NEWMAN

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 assemblies is now left solitary in echoing emptiness, and the crowds of to-day have passed 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 passage 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 God, 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 sanctity.

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