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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
CRUELTY AND CHRISTIANITY:
A LECTURE,
DELIVERED BY
ALLEN D. GRAHAM, Esq., M.A.,
UNDER THE AUSPICES OR THE
“SUNDAY EVENINGS FOR THE PEOPLE,”
AT THE
FREEMASONS’. HALL, LONDON,
On SUNDAY, NOV. 9th, 1873.
PUBLISHED
NO.
BY
THOMAS
SCOTT,
II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD.
LONDON, S.E.
1874.
Price Sixpence.
�SUMMARY.
INTRODUCTORY.---- MEDIEVAL CRUELTY.—TO A GREAT EX
TENT DUE
TO
THE
CORRUPTION
OF CHRISTIANITY.----
THIS CORRUPTION TO BE SEEN IN THE DEVELOPMENT
OF
THREE
IDEAS,
WHICH
DIRECTLY
OR
INDIRECTLY
FOSTERED A CRUEL SPIRIT.—THESE IDEAS IRRATIONAL.
—THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST.
�MW
CRUELTY AND CHRISTIANITY.
AN’S cruelty to man ! It is not a pleasant
subject. You will say, perhaps, “ Why take
it ? ” My answer is, because there is a great deal
to be learnt from it. The facts about which I propose
to speak to you are some of the most instructive
facts in history; facts, that is, from which we may
draw very important inferences. Many persons read
history without being instructed. They take the
facts and the dates and pack them away in their
brains on the shelf called memory, labelled and
arranged like pots of jam in a cupboard, and they
are proud to bring them out occasionally at a
moment’s notice to show to company : but they don’t
use their facts, they never eat their jam ; they don’t
compare their facts together so as to draw conclusions
from them; they have a two here and a two there,
but they never put two and two together and so
arrive at four. But he who wishes that his know
ledge should become wisdom, that instead of being
sterile and barren it should be the fruitful mother of
useful lessons, he treats his facts as children treat their
toy letters, that is, as having no particular interest
in themselves, but as capable of being so sorted and
arranged as to produce words full of meaning and
value. And this is my apology. If I were going to
talk of facts only I would choose pleasant ones, if we
were not going beyond letters you should have pretty
ones ; but I hope to put my letters together, and
then, although I confess that taken singly they are
M
A
�4
Cruelty and Christianity.
black and ugly, I expect that we shall be able to
spell out from them many beautiful words—such as
these, Tolerance, Love, Christianity.
But first of all I will tell you in two or three
sentences what is the general scope and purpose of
this lecture. I want to give you what I take to be
the explanation of one of the strangest facts in
history. This fact, one of the strangest facts in all
history, is the cruelty of the Christian world a few
years ago. Please to notice exactly the expression,
the Christian world a few years ago; that is to say, we
are not going to think about barbarous savages upon
whom the light of religion and civilisation has never
shone, or of tyrants whom the intoxication of abso
lute power has brutalised to insanity ; we are not
going to think of Europe in the Dark Ages, when, it
might be objected, the voice of humanity was drowned
in violence, and the voice of Christianity as yet
but faintly heard ; but we are to think of a world that
knew something of order and culture, a world that
for a thousand years had professed the Christian
faith, a world in which the Christian Church was
the chief institution—Christian Europe two and three
centuries ago. And the cruelty of Christian Europe
at that time was so gross, the indifference to human
suffering so complete, that my great difficulty in
preparing this lecture has been to give you an
adequately suggestive account without distressing
you beyond endurance by horrible and disgusting
details.
Surely I am justified in calling this a remarkably
strange fact when we remember that the cruel world
before us made its boast of a religion which was
emphatically a religion of love. Is it not passing
strange that cruelty should have been for a time the
chief characteristic of a Church which represented
Christianity, when gentleness, mercy, and a forgiving
spirit were chief characteristics of him who founded
�Cruelty and Christianity,
$
Christianity ? My object this evening is to explain
how this curious anomaly came to be.
We must take a hurried look at our facts, at the
-cruelties of the age. I shall confine myself to the
treatment of criminals, and I do so not only because
it would take too long to bring forward a great
variety of facts, but also because the treatment of
criminals illustrates most fairly the temper of the
times. Excesses committed in war, or in riot, or by
tyrants, or by men of unusual brutality, although
they have their significance, do not necessarily reflect
the public conscience ; but in the treatment of
criminals by legal tribunals we have a deliberate
expression of that conscience, perturbed it is true
very frequently by panic and passion, but yet reveal
ing on the whole with tolerable accuracy the ideas of
justice and mercy entertained by the community at
large.
See how the times have changed. How careful
we are with our criminals. We caution them not to
commit themselves, if there is a doubt of their guilt
they get the benefit of it, if convicted of the grossest
violence we hesitate as to flogging them, we differ as
to the expediency in any case of capital punishment.
In the Reformation age, on the contrary, everywhere
I believe but in this country—and even here, as we
shall see, the exception did not invariably prevail—
prisoners were tortured during and after trial;
during their trial that they might confess to their
own guilt or to that of their supposed accomplices,
and after trial for the sake of aggravating the horrors
of death. Old writers give us fourteen kinds of
torture and thirteen methods of inflicting capital
punishment.
[The next few paragraphs were illustrated by sketches, and,
as these cannot here be referred to, this portion of the lecture
has received a slight alteration.]
�6
Cruelty and Christianity.
The four principal sorts of torture were by the
rack, cords, water, and the pulley.
The sketch represents the racking of Cuthbert
Simson in the Tower, here in London, a little more
than three hundred years ago. He was the minister
of a Protestant congregation, and was racked that he
might be made to betray the names of his supporters.
He was afterwards burnt in Smithfield. The rack
was again used in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
The instrument was an oblong frame, placed hori
zontally upon the ground, with a windlass at each
end. The hands and feet of the prisoner as he lay
within the frame were made fast to cords which
passed round the windlasses, so that when these were
turned his limbs were strained to dislocation. Ima
gine delicate women being subjected to this agony,
these indignities ! Yet we read of such horrors in
histories of the Inquisition. You all know, I daresay,
that the Inquisition was the tribunal set up by the
Church of Rome for the discovery and punishment
of heretics, or, as Mr Motley puts it, “a machine for
inquiring into a man’s thoughts, and for burning
him if the result was not satisfactory.” On the
Zucws a non lucendo principle, it was called the
Holy Office. Its process was simple and effective.
“ It arrested on suspicion, tortured till confession,
and then punished by fire.” A Dr Rule, who is I
believe a well-known Wesleyan minister, published
a History of the Inquisition about five years ago
which seems to have been written with care and
candour, and in it you will see an account of the
atrocities perpetrated upon women as well as men in
the dungeons of the Inquisition. I will quote two
of the many cases he records, by way of illustrating
the torture by cords and by water. In the first of
these tortures cords were bound round the limbs,
and then by means of some mechanism, which appears
to have varied in different prisons, they were suddenly
tightened until they cut into the flesh.
�Cruelty and Christianity,
7
A certain lady of Seville in the year 1559 was
suspected of heresy. “To be suspected, in . the
meaning of the Holy Office, is to be guilty;
and this lady was instantly seized, and thrown
into the castle of Triana. As they found that she
was soon to become a mother they allowed her to
remain in an upper apartment until the birth of
a male child, which was taken from her at the end
of eight days; and after the lapse of seven more
she was sent down into a dungeon. Then began
the trial. Charges were made which she could np^
acknowledge with truth, and they were not slow
in applying torture. But how could friends be ex
pected to pity this young mother ? To bind her
arms and legs with cords, and to gash the limbs with
successive strainings by the levers, or to dislocate
her joints by swinging her from pulleys, yet sparing
vital parts, would have been the usual course of
torment, and from all that she might have recovered.
But anguish brought no confession: and as one of
their authorities afterwards wrote in the Cartilla of
that same Holy House, “ there are other parts.” The
savages in their fury, passed a cord over her breast,
thinking to add new pangs; and by an additional
outrage of decency, as well as humanity, extort some
cry that might serve to criminate husband or friend.
But when the tormentor weighed down the bar, her
frame gave way, the ribs crushed inwards. Blood
flowed from her mouth and nostrils, and she was
carried to her cell, where life just lingered for another
week, and then the God of pity took her to himself.”
The following will sufficiently describe the torture
by water. “ A physician, Juan de Salas, was accused
of having used a profane expression, twelve months
before, in the heat of a dispute. He denied the
charge, and brought several witnesses in support of
the denial. But the Inquisitor Moriz at Valladolid,
where the information was laid, caused De Salas to
�8
Cruelty and Christianity.
be brought again into his presence in the torment
chamber, stripped to his shirt, and laid on the ladder
or donkey, an instrument resembling a wooden trough,
just large enough to receive the body, with no bottom,
but having a bar, or bars, so placed that the body
bent by its own weight into an exquisitely painful
position. The poor man, so laid, was bound round
the arms and legs with hempen cords, each of them
encircling the limb eleven times. During this part of
the operation they admonished him to confess the
blasphemy; but he only answered that he had never
spoken a sentence of such a kind, and then, resigning
himself to suffer, repeated the Athanasian Creed, and
prayed “ to God and Our Lady many times.” Being
still bound, they raised his head, covered his face
with a piece of fine linen, and, forcing open the mouth,
caused water to drip into it from an earthern jar,
slightly perforated at the bottom, producing, in addi
tion to his sufferings from distension, a horrid sensa
tion of choking. But again, when they removed the
jar for a moment, he declared that he had never
uttered such a sentence : and this was repeated often.
They then pulled the cords on his right leg, cutting
into the flesh, replaced the linen on his face, dropped
the water as before, and tightened the cords on his
right leg the second time; but still he maintained
that he had never spoken such a thing; and, in
answer to the questions of his tormentors, still con
stantly reiterated that he had never spoken such a
thing. Moriz then pronounced that the torture
should be regarded as begun, but not finished; and
De Salas was released, to live, if he could survive, in
the incessant apprehension that if he gave the least
umbrage to a familiar or to an informer, he would be
carried again into the same chamber, and be racked
in every limb. This was one case of thousands. Tor
tures and deaths were of every-day occurrence.”
The torture in which the pulley was a principal
�Cruelty and Christianity.
9
feature consisted in raising the victim to a height by
means of a cord fastened to his wrists or thumbs,
with a weight attached to his feet. Sometimes he
would be made to drop suddenly to within a short
distance of the floor, the usual result being that he
was crippled for life.
These were the more moderate tortures—tortures
which, since they were employed by the officials of
the Church, may be deemed to have been respectable.
There were others, resorted to by local tribunals,
ingeniously horrible, but too painful to be described.
We may pass on to the methods used for putting.crimi
nals to death. I will mention two out of the thirteen.
A punishment, called hrealving on the wheel, became
common in France about 350 years ago. The name
more properly belongs to a very ancient punishment
in which a huge wheel was the instrument actually
used. The modern process was this: the criminal
was stretched out flat upon two pieces of timber fixed
together in the form of a St Andrew s cross, these
being deeply notched in eight places underneath the
principal limbs. The executioner with an iron bar
then broke the arms and legs at these points, and
finally, by two or three blows upon the chest, resigned
his victim to the welcome mercy of death.
A still more horrible fate was reserved for those
who had attempted the life of the Sovereign. Horses
were harnessed to their feet and hands, and made to
pull gently for an hour or two, until vengeance had
been quenched in agony. Then, and not till then,
the animals were allowed to put out all their strength,
and the memberless trunk remained upon the scaffold,
a bloody and startling commentary upon those famous
words—“ A new commandment I give unto you, that
ye love one another.” Jean Chatel, who wounded
Henry the Fourth of France in 1595 ; Ravaillac, whd
assassinated him fifteen years later; and Damiens,
who tried but failed to murder Louis the Fifteenth
�IO
Cruelty and Christianity.
in 1757, were all executed in this manner. Now,
just imagine such a punishment as this being inflicted
in a Christian country 116 years ago, and for a crime
that was not consummated. We read of Damiens—
11 The hand by which he attempted the murder was
burned at a slow fire ; the fleshy parts of his body
were then torn off by pincers; and, finally, he was
dragged about for an hour by four strong horses,
while into his numerous wounds were poured molten
lead, resin, oil, and boiling wax.” Where could such
infernal atrocities have come from ? Surely AeZZ /
And, strange to say, this, the answer that seems
instinctively to leap to our lips, has in it a real
element of literal truth.
Those who have not looked into the subject have
little idea how slowly the horrors we have been
dwelling upon ceased to be. Torture was not aban
doned by Continental nations until about a century
ago. France is indebted for her emancipation to
her great revolution. When our George the Third
was king the most brutal punishments were being
inflicted in France and Spain, and it is stated in
“ Chambers’s Encyclopaedia ” that breaking on the
wheel “ has been occasionally inflicted during the
present century in Germany on persons convicted of
treason and parricide.”
You might be tempted to ask why the Church was
unable to check the barbarities of the civil power.
The answer lies in the fact that example is stronger
than precept; and the example set by the Church
during the Reformation age is seen in the torment
rooms of the Inquisition. Protestants, however,
must take care not to make the mistake of supposing
that the Church was cruel because it was Catholic.
The Reformed Churches have nothing to boast of on
the score of humanity. They did not set up an In
quisition, because this would have been impossible
among peoples who had exercised independence
�Cruelty and Christianity.
11
to the extent of separating themselves from Rome;
but the Inquisitor spirit was strong in them, and
they lacked the power rather than the will to perse
cute. Knox, in Scotland, declares that all idolaters,
that is, all Roman Catholics, should be put to death;
Calvin, at Geneva, burns Servetus; and Queen Eliza
beth, in London, sends two Anabaptists to the flames,
where they perish, in the words of one who was living
at the time, “in great horror, crying and roaring.”
This cruelty of the Christian world, a few years
ago, is it not a remarkable fact ? People have said
to me, “ It was the times.” It is odd they do not
Bee that this is a sham answer ; that they have only
put the question a step further back; that the very
point we are puzzled about is why the times were so
cruel. Civilisation was not recent; religion was not
a new thing. To what, then, are we to attribute the
inhumanity of Christian nations ? To Christianity ?
No I But to the corruption of Christianity.
You see it is not for nothing that I rake up the
cruelties of the past. I do not call our forefathers
from the tomb merely to abuse and scold them. My
object is to discover the causes that led them astray.
When men make mistakes upon such a large scale,
when the action of society in any particular is so long
and so widely perverted, it must be because the springs
of action are poisoned, and in the age we have been
considering, the springs of action, that is, the princi
ples and opinions of men, were poisoned bv a corrupt
Christianity. Now in what did the corruption of
Christianity consist, and how had it come about ? I
will make an attempt to give you some account of
the matter, but it is difficult to tell such a story in a
few words.
By Ghristianity, I mean the ideas of Jesus Christ.
By corrupt Ghristianity, I mean the adulterated article
which the Church has circulated as the Christianity
of Christ. I shall say a little more about the Chris-
�12
Cruelty and Christianity,
tianity of Christ at the end of my lecture, but now I
will only say that I believe it to have been, as simple
and beautiful a religion as has ever been offered to
mankind. In fact, too good for mankind. The
mantle that fell from the dying Master—who, dying,
said, “ Father, forgive them; for they know not what
they do ’ ’—that mantle was too large for men, and
men, instead of waiting and hoping to grow to it,
tried to improve upon it, poor creatures ! They put
a patch here and a patch there, they stretched some
parts and took in others, and thus endeavoured to.
bring it down to the level of their own stunted
statures. You understand me ; they distorted the
teaching of Christ, exaggerating the side they fancied,
neglecting the side they did not like, and now and
then, no doubt, attributing to him things he never
said. I will give you instances of each kind of per
version, and the consequences.
Jesus appears to have used some rather strong and
startling language about future punishment. There
is so much metaphor in it that we cannot tell pre
cisely what he meant; but if he intended his words
to bear the construction posterity has put upon them
he contradicted himself, for at other times and far
more frequently he spoke of God as a good God, a
loving Father, an example of forbearance and gentle-,
ness to his children, ideas utterly incompatible with
the doctrine of eternal woe. But these milder ideas
imposed on men reciprocal obligations of love to the
Father, and of gentleness and goodwill towards the
other members of the family, and this was irksome
to poor human nature. A man who would be
honest in respect to his spiritual life, must ever
remember that the law of love, being the highest
law, is so difficult to fulfil that his heart is sure
to cast about for some means of evading it without
incurring its own condemnation. Thus it is that
zeal for the Lord has been more popular than love
�Cruelty and Christianity.
ij
for the Lord, and men have ever been prone to
impute guilt to their brethren in respect to their
religious opinions, only because it is thus easier for
them to hide from themselves the far greater guilt
of their own vanity, jealousy and illwill. We must
keep this truth before us if we would understand how
it was that the early Church neglected the more
tender side of Christ’s teaching and fastened upon its
harsher aspects. The result was the doctrine of
Eternal Punishment, a doctrine which, as developed
by theologians, embodies the most ghastly and blas
phemous idea ever presented to the human mind.
According to this doctrine, the destiny of a large
portion of our race is Hell ; a perpetual Auto-da-Fe ;
a torture-house on a scale commensurate with infinite
power, when guided by infinite skill and impelled by
infinite malice. I use this language with no irreve
rence of mind; I desire to repudiate the horrible
doctrine with all the emphasis I can. I do so for
truth’s sake, believing it to be a lie; for the sake of
man, to whom it has been a curse; and, if I may
humbly say so, for God s sake, because it makes
Atheism preferable to Faith. This doctrine sanc
tioned human cruelty. It represented God—herein
lay the blasphemy—as “ a murderer from the
beginning,” and cruelty being enthroned in heaven
could scarcely be regarded as a crime on earth. It
was not reasonable that men should strive to be
better than their God. He, being of infinite power,
tormented his enemies for ever ; they being limited
in power, tormented their enemies as long as they
could. The imitation was as perfect as the circum
stances would permit.
I said that besides distorting the teaching of Jesus,
men attributed to him words which in all probability
he never used. For instance, in the Gospel of St
Mark, he is made to say, “ He that believeth and is
baptized shall be saved, and he thatbelieveth not shall
�14
Cruelty and Christianity.
be damned.” There is reason for supposing that he
never said anything of the kind ; the passage in which
these words occur is considered by many scholars to
have been added to the Gospel by a later hand. A
most unfortunate addition ! For it asserts the prin
ciple that unbelief is sinful, a principle which has been
a perpetual plague to Christendom, and which even
now disturbs the peace of many an honest man. It
suited the Church to make much of this text. She
assumed that not to agree with her was equivalent to
unbelief, and thus heresy came to be mortal sin. The
heretic, the man who thought for himself and did not
think with the Church, was seen to be a destroyer of
souls. The inquisitor, the man who hunted up the
heretic and put him to death, was seen to be a saviour
of souls. Philip of Spain ordered that every Pro
testant in the Netherlands should be put to death.
If impenitent, they were to be burned. If they re
turned to the Church a milder punishment was
allowed; the men were to be beheaded, the women
buried alive. And from the Church’s point of view
Philip of Spain was right. If heresy was mortal sin
and mortal sin entailed eternal death, it was better
that a nation of heretics should be stamped out than
that they should live to propagate their kind, making
earth, in fact, a mere nursery for hell.
These particular ideas, then, the sinfulness of heresy
and the eternal punishment of sin, tended directly to
foster cruelty; but they also united to give birth to a
third idea, which, although not formulated as a dogma,
had a very real existence, and a very disastrous
influence upon the character of the time. This idea
may be described as a belief in the primary importance
of the theological side of Christianity. Christianity
is first and foremost a way of living, not a way of
believing; but men reversed this, the true aspect
of it, and came to think that Creed was every
thing, Conduct comparatively nothing. Of course
�Cruelty and Christianity,
15
when people held such views as these they lost
all sense of proportion in morality, they had no
true criterion. When orthodoxy went far towards
atoning for every crime, but no degree of virtue could
atone for heresy, the loyal churchman could give him
self up to fraud, or violence, or cruelty, or sensuality,
with but little sense of guilt, and still thank God he
was not so badly off as the blameless heretic.
I have attributed mediaeval cruelty mainly to the
corruption of Christianity, and I have described that
corruption as consisting mainly in the prominence
given to three ideas. Let us now consider for a
moment how irrational those ideas are.
Is it not irrational to suppose that God will visit
the sins of finite mortals, who owe to Him their frail
and fallible natures, with infinite pain ? The idea is
incompatible with any notion of goodness that we are
capable of forming, and if we cannot think of God
as good we had better not think of Him at all. It is
enough to send men mad to think of God as bad. A
good God and an eternal Hell are conceptions
destructive of each other; we must choose which
we will keep; we cannot keep both ; better part with
Hell than with God.
Is it not irrational to suppose that heresy, or dis
belief of theological dogmas, is sinful ? Theology
deals with facts and doctrines. The facts are. so
marvellous that it would be difficult to substantiate
them eVen if they had happened only last week ; but
they happened, it is said, ages ago, and therefore it
is almost impossible for any unprejudiced person to
feel certain that they took place. The doctrines
relate, for the most part, to matters outside the range of
our faculties, so that no man can say he believes them
in the sense in which he believes intelligible proposi
tions. Is it not then irrational to suppose that it can
be sinful for us to differ about facts which are doubt
ful, and about doctrines which are unintelligible?
�16
Cruelty and Christianity.
Difference and doubt are inevitable if men use the
reason God has given them, and the inevitable in
such a case can scarcely be a crime 1
. And is it not irrational to suppose that our theolo
gical belief is more important than character and
conduct ? Our character or what we are, our conduct
or what we do, our dispositions and tempers, and the
words and acts that flow from them are of vital importance, pregnant with misery or happiness to
ourselves and all around us. But our theological
opinions, except in so far as they make us better or
worse, do not signify to anybody. Moreover whilst,
Creeds are, as I said, uncertain and unintelligible,
character and conduct can be studied and under
stood. It is comparatively easy to diseover the laws
of the Religion which is a Life; comparatively easy
to see what “ makes for righteousness ” and to see
how righteousness makes for bliss. I would not on
any account be thought to mean that theology should
be treated with levity, much less with scorn. For to
theology belong those most stupendous problems
which at once provoke and defy the scrutiny of man.
What are we ? Why are we ? Whence do we come ?
W hither are we bound ? The theologies of man repre
sent for the most part his efforts to find an answer to
these questionings, and though we may deem the efforts
unsuccessful they yet deserve our sympathy and our
respect. What I maintain is that the conclusions
to which we may come on matters beyond the reach
of knowledge cannot be regarded as vitally important.
Patience, reverence, carefulness, in forming our
opinions—these are important, but the opinions
themselves—herein is that pearl of great price, the
secret of true toleration—the opinions themselves
have not necessarily any moral character whatsoever,
cannot properly be made a pretext for praise or blame.
You may consider your neighbour foolish or illinformed for holding a certain theological opinion,
�Cruelty and Christianity.
but you have no right to think him a bad man for
doing so. It is silly to blame him because he
believes in a future state or because he disbelieves
in it. A man is not good because he believes
that Christ rose from the dead, but neither is he bad
because he does not believe it. It is not wrong to
believe in God, but neither is it right. These things
are obscure, almost if not quite beyond us ; they de
serve patient, reverent consideration; but that
granted, the actual conclusions we may come to
respecting them are neither meritorious nor blame
worthy. Why do I insist so much upon this ? Why
am I so careful to be plain ? Because in this short
and simple formula—theological opinions have no in
trinsic value—there is great virtue. It represents a
truth which is essential to the progress of the world,
essential to its growth in goodness and in happiness.
Christian Love, once a great reality, fairest of all
flowers that have blossomed in the Earthly Paradise,
the only heal-all of humanity, Christian Love cannot
flourish until men have ceased to quarrel about Chris
tian Creeds. This quarrelling has come of the cor
ruption of Christianity; true Christianity, that is,
Christ’s Christianity, is not responsible for it. I will
not keep you much longer; let me only show you in
a few last words that this corruption of Christianity
which made the Creed of great importance, the Life
of little importance, which put believing before loving;
a corruption which bore fruit in tortures and strife,
and which still finds expression in the Athanasian
Creed of the Church of England, this corrupt phase
is a parody of Christianity, a libel upon the life that
closed on Calvary.
He that died on Calvary, what did he teach ?
There is great uncertainty about him. I have even
heard it questioned whether such a person as Jesus
Christ ever existed; but I don’t think that doubt
need go as far as that. The first three Gospels pro
�18
Cruelty and Christianity.
bably give a fairly accurate account of the teaching
of Jesus. At all events, we have nothing more au
thoritative to appeal to; and therefore, taking my
stand upon them, I am safe in saying that, if we
know anything about Christ’s teaching at all, we
know that he taught—what ? Abstruse doctrines ?
No. Did he make known something new; reveal
something about the supernatural world which had
not been in men’s minds before ? No. Did he pre
scribe some elaborate form of worship ? No. He
taught that men should live lives of love. This was
his great point, his “happy thought.” The theology
of Jesus was of the simplest possible kind. God, the
good father. Prayer, the child’s talk to his father.
Heaven, the child at home with his father. On these
three points he dwelt with the fervour natural to a
religious genius of that day. For these ideas were
not new. They had got dry, that was all, as ideas
do dry up in this world. Dry, withered and un
sightly, like sea-weeds out of water. Steeped in the
fresh enthusiasm of Jesus, these ideas revived again
and recovered grace and brilliancy. But Jesus had
another enthusiasm, an enthusiasm for Love; for
that gentle Sexless Spirit of Love which alone is
needed to make earth a heaven.
For a brief moment the enthusiasm of Love sur
vived in the Church, and the spectacle converted the
world. Marvellous is the transforming power of
Love. It is the source to which we must look for
individual happiness and for the regeneration of the
world. Don’t you feel you want something ? You,
for such no doubt are here, you whose minds have
drifted from the old faiths, don’t you feel sometimes
that we want something not ourselves to live for ?
That our lives need to be warmed by a passion, puri
fied and elevated by an enthusiasm, that the mill in
which we grind is in itself a monotonous sort of place,
that the toil and struggle of life tend somewhat to
�Cruelty and Christianity.
J9
lower and harden us, to make our minds small and
our hearts cold ? Would it not be pleasant to have
an enthusiasm which should take the sting out of
sorrow, the edge off temptation, the chill out of life,
and the gloom away from death ? I think so, I
should like it, and men have for the most part the
same wants. Well—Love is enough, Love is suffi
cient for these things. Live loveful lives—this is
Christianity.
If the Church had been faithful to this Christianity
there would have been by this time little poverty,
little suffering, little sorrow, little sin; little, I mean,
in comparison with the plagues with which the world
is now afflicted. These plagues are not incurable; it
is late, not too late to mend. From time to time in
the world’s history humanity receives a call to rise,
like Lazarus, to a new life. And now, on every side
is heard the sound of many voices calling it to come
forth from the tomb of ignorance and superstition, to
shake off the icy grasp of bigotry and intolerance, to
drop the mouldering cerements of a Church-made
Christianity, and to clothe itself in the simple raiment
of Love, which alone, like the garment for which men
once cast lots, is “without seam, woven from the top
throughout.”
I repeat once more the point I care for most.
There is a religion which does not signify, a religion
which has deluged Europe with blood, and which, if
power be given to it, may so deluge it again; a reli
gion which once inspired its chief representative to
strike a medal in honour of one of the most
atrocious massacres of history; a religion, the forces
of which are even now raving like chained hounds
eager to destroy the growing liberties of the nation^
—this religion which does not signify is a religion
of theologies, a religion, that is, made up of beliefs
about one who is far away and about one who lived
long ago. God—it has pleased infinite wisdom that
�20
Cruelty and Christianity.
this should be—God is far away, far, I mean, from
our understandings. To have clear views about Him
we must wait for other conditions, other faculties,
“ to know more we must be more.” Christ lived long
ago, in the first century, this is the nineteenth; we
cannot, cotemporary history being silent, know cer
tainly what happened so long ago. But there is a
religion which does signify, a religion which may
indeed draw warmth and strength from simple faith
in God and simple love for Christ, but which has no
necessary connection with theologies; a religion
which no change of times shall ever shock, because
its foundations are firmly rooted in the facts of
human nature and human circumstance; a religion
which I Call Christianity because it was, I believe,
taught by Christ; a religion which is not a theology
but a life—the Life of Love.
C. W. REYNELL, PRINTER, BITTLE PULTBNEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�INDEX
TO
THOMAS SCOTT’S
PUBLICATIONS.
ALPHABETICAL!.-! ARRANGED.
The following Pamphlets and Papers may be had on addressing
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Price.
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The Impeachment
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o 3
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Notes on Bishop Magee’s Pleadings for Christ
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-
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•
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Scepticism and Social Justice
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:
3
�ii
Index to Thomas Scotfs Publications.
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The Chronological Weakness of Prophetic Interpretation -11
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The Gospel of the Kingdom
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The Church of England Catechism Examined. A Reprint
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Origin of the Legends
Critically Examined -
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of
Isaac, and J acob
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ths
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-
Reason versus Authority -
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BROOK, W. 0. CARR.
- 0 3
BROWN, GAMALIEL.
An Appeal to the Preachers
Sunday Lyrics
The New Doxology
-
of all the
Creeds -
-
.
-
-
• -
- 0 3
-03
-03
CANTAB, A.
Jesus versus Christianity
-
-
-
-
- 0
6
CARROLL, Rev. W. G., Rector of St Bride’s, Dublin.
The Collapse
of the
by the Orthodox
Faiths or, the Deity of Christ as now taught
-
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-
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-
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.
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- 0 6
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- 0 3
-.06
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COBBE, Miss F. P.
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The Spiritual Serfdom
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of the
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the
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COUNTRY VICAR, A.
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-
of
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-
-
The Bible for Man, not Man for the Bible
-
-
- 0 6
- 0 6
�Index to Thomas Scott’s Publications.
CRANBROOK, The late Rev. JAMES.
0 3
0«3
- 0 3
On the Formation of Religious Opinions On the Hindrances to Progress in Theology
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DUPUIS, from the French of.
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Christianity a Form of the great Solar Myth -
F. H. I.
Spiritual Pantheism
0 9
- 0 6
.....
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Everlasting Punishment. A Letter to Thomas Scott
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On Religion
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0
......
3
FROM “ THE INDEX,” published at Boston, U.S.A.
...
Talk Kindly, but Avoid Argument
GELDART, Rev. E. M.
The Living God
-
-
-
.
-, 0 3
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GRAHAM, A. D., and F. H.
On Faith
0
-------
3
HANSON, Sir R. D., Chief-Justice of South Australia.
Science and Theology
...
.
.
0 4
HARE, The Right Rev. FRANCIS, D.D., formerly Lord Bishop of
Chichester.
The Difficulties and Discouragements which Attend the Study of
the Scriptures
------- 0 6
HINDS, SAMUEL, D.D., late Bishop of Norwich.
Annotations on the Lord’s Prayer. (See Scott’s Practical Remarks)
Another Reply to the Question, “ What have we got to Rely
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A Reply to the Question, “ Apart from Supernatural Revela
0
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Portrait -------
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- 0 6
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Theology of the Past and the Future. Reprinted from Part I. of
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With Portrait
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1V
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d'
Church Cursing and Atheism
_
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Ark
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_
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The Judgment
Mr Voysey
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-
Case
in the
.
.
-
of
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.
-0 3
.
-
.
.
- 0 6
- 0 6
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- .
..
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Jewish Literature and Modern Education; or, the Use and Abuse
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The Utilisation
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With Portrait
-
- 1 6
- 0 6
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-
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_
_
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_
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- 0 6
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the
_
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.or
�v
Index to ’Thomas Scott's Publications.
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.
-
.
-
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_
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Christianity and Education in India.
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-
A Lecture delivered at
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.
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_
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Garden of Eden
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-
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The Story
of the
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Five Letters on a Roman Catholic Conversion 0 3
Is Jesus God?
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The Resurrection
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-
’
-
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Realities
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VOYSEY, The Rev. CHARLES.
On Moral Evil
0
&
W. E. B.
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The Province of Prayer ------ 0 6
WHEELWRIGHT,, the Rev. GEORGE.
Three Letters on the Voysey Judgment and the Christian
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o
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Sacerdotalism
-------
o
6
WORTHINGTON, The Rev. W. R.
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the
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-
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Testament, and Believing without Understanding
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- © 6
Old
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Natural Phenomena and their Influence on Different Religious Systems 0 3
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have been published.
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On
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WHEELWRIGHT, the Rev. GEORGE.
The Edinburgh Review
Dr Strauss
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-
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Christianity. A Lecture
-
-
-
- 0 6
and
GRAHAM, ALLEN D., M.A.
Cruelty
and
DEAN, Rev. PETER, Minister of Olerkenwell Unitarian Church.
The Impossibility of Knotting what is Christianity
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�SCOTT’S 'ENGLISH LIFE OF JESUS.’
In One Volume, 8w, bound in cloth, post free, 4s. 4d.,
SECOND EDITION
OF
THE ENGLISH LIFE OF JESUS.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR,
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Il THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
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Notice.—Post Office Orders to be made payable to Thomas
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�
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Cruelty and Christianity : a lecture [...]
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Place of publication: London
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Text
Vicarious Suffering.
OUR
SANCTIONS
FOR
CRUELTY.
BY
SALADIN.
(Reprinted from the “Agnostic Journal.")
May 31st, 1902.
LONDON:
W. STEWART & CO., 4b FARRINGDON ST,
E.C.
�Every Thursday.
Price Twopence.
Journal
AND ECLECTIC REVIEW.
EDITED
BY
SALADIN.
V Under name and pen-name, some of the most
scholarly and able writers of the age contribute regularly
to The Agnostic Journal ; and, although the Editorial
policy is opposed to the popular and dominant faith,
the columns of the journal are ever open to articles in
defence of Christianity from clergymen or lay Christians
of recognized ability, while considerable space is devoted
to the investigation of Theosophy, Spiritualism,
Mysticism, etc.
The Agnostic Journal can be had free by post on
the following terms :—Quarterly, 2s. 8|d.; half-yearly,
5s. 5d. ; yearly, 10s. iod. Orders should be given to
local newsagents ; but where this is impracticable they
should be sent direct to the Publishing Office.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�VICARIOUS SUFFERING.
“ Man’s inhumanity to man ” is the blight and canker
and bane of human life. In recent decades human
ingenuity has been, in part, directed to such benignant
inventions as the steam-engine and the electric telegraph
and telephone. But, anterior to those decades, for
century upon century, man’s mechanical ingenuity was
principally directed to the production of instruments of
torture, to contrivances which applied to those mystic
harp-strings, the human nerves, could evoke every note in
the gamut of agony.
In the Ages of Faith, in the ages in which the Church
which claimed, and still claims, to be of Christ was
supreme, we had no telescope, no gas-light, no railway, no
printing-press ; but we had the rack, the wheel, the boots,
the thumb-screw, the witch’s bridle, the Iron Virgin, and
other torture-engines too numerous and devilish to be
catalogued here. In our museums you can still behold
preserved specimens of these mechanical horrors. The
sight of them makes me shudder : then, what effect must
their hellish spectacle of rust and horror have upon you,
O Orthodoxist, when you remember that it was almost
exclusively in the service of the Church that that rack tore
human joints out of their sockets, that the boots there
�4
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
held the leg of a human being till blood from the ruptured
veins and marrow from the shattered bone splashed in
the face of him who, with swinging hammer, drove home
the merciless wedges ? Here is heresy, some incom
prehensibly subtle doctrinal distinction contemned : then,
tighten the wedges, apply the hammer ; as weighed against
the crime of heresy how trifling are blood and marrow
and anguish and agony !
Were grimly fanatical believers culpably inconsistent
with their creed in thus mangling their fellow human
beings ? Did not the Lord, at the very outset of his
career with man, shew that he preferred the red blood of
the veins to the red flush of the rose ? Did he not prefer
the fat of Abel’s veal to the fragrance of Cain’s violets ?
Cain : Poor Abel ! he was but a shepherd boy,
Who offered up the firstlings of his flocks
In order to appease Jehovah’s wrath,
Who revelled in the pangs and dying groans
Of the poor beasts who never did him wrong.
My heart revolted at the cruel sport. ’Twas I
Refused to torture gentle innocents,
But, taking fruit, I offered it to Him,
Altho’ ’twas mock’ry, seeing all was His.
Spirit : Fruit would not do. The Lord has ordered blood.
Cain : My brother, as a shepherd, offered lambs,
And I, as husbandman, did offer fruit.
Methought the offering of one’s toil is best acceptable.
Spirit : Blood, dying pangs, the torture of the innocent,
Alone appeases the Almighty’s wrath.
Cain : Ay ! to the shame of all created things,
Thou speakest true—He loveth blood I *
Did not the entire wheel of the Christians’ faith turn upon
the pivot of blood and suffering ? Was not the man-god
in whom they believed nailed, hand and foot, to the bitter
cross ? Painters, poets, theologians and historians, have
testified to the pain and ignomy of crucifixion. It was not
* Lady Florence Dixie, in “ Abel Avenged,” in Part II. of
“ The Songs of a Child.”
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
5
mere execution, as we now understand the word; it was
studied torture. In being nailed, or lashed, to the cross, no
vital organ of the victim was affected. Crucifixion was, with
hellish ingenuity, designed to elicit and stimulate all the
suffering of which the nerves of the culprit were capable,
even to the last spasm and writhe of anguish and agony.
A strong culprit has been known to hang on the cross
for several days, before exposure to the sun, hunger, slow
haemorrhage and fiery thirst brought death in merciful
relief.
And this is the revolting and horrible torture to which
the Church deliberately and dogmatically subjected her
man-deity. Lest the horror upon which her very existence
rested should be overlooked or forgotten, crucifixes with
a tortured and nude human figure nailed thereto were
exhibited everywhere, in wood, in stone, on canvas.
And, as if this were not enough of the cruel and the
horrible, the twelve “ Stations of the Cross,” each more
shudderingly revolting than the other, were invented and
forced, in all their repellant gruesomness, upon the wild
and sanguinary imagination of an unlettered public.
Blood! Blood ! Blood everywhere ! “ Without the
shedding of blood there is no remission.” “ Except
ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, there is no life in
you.”
This horrible dithyramb with the refrain of “ Blood ”
only too truculently commended itself to the fierce races
in the fields of Christian mission. Blood, not brain.
Brain was crude, credulous and inchoate, and applied its
raw rapacity to blood and the merciless shedding
thereof. Zealots, bigots, their god had been tortured, and
.they, not incoherently, took to inventing instruments “ for
His name’s sake.” Habituation to the idea of crucifixion—
“ and, being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and
the sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling
�6
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
down to the ground”—hardened all the more gentle
and tender humanitarian instincts, as daily contemplation
of cruel and morbid topics inevitably will. And, here, in
London, only a few years ago, we had, on exhibition, a
collection of torture-engines by which, through dark and
bloody ages, on the scaffold and in the dungeon, the Gospel
had been protected in its purity against the taint of
heresy.
Perdition to the church that required such engines to pro
tect her against heresy ! Now, on every side, she is assailed
by heresy—nay, by blank unbelief; and this contumacious
journal is, every week, hurled in her teeth in defiant
scorn. Yet who will say that, in spite of this, the world
is not better than it was at the time when this serial would
have been in the flames and its editor on the rack ?
Blood! Blood ! “ There is a fountain filled with
blood.” Well, disinfect the abhorrent nuisance and fill
it up with rubble: scatter over it a layer of rich and
generous mould ; there let the wholesome green grass wave
round the rathe roses of Reason and the white lilies of
Peace. Can it be wondered at that this habituation to the
conception of the sanguinary and horrible has rendered
Christianity the bloodiest agency that has ever cursed the
earth with its presence ? I fearlessly appeal to history in
corroboration of my averment. “ I come not to bring
peace, but a sword,” is a dictum put into the mouth of
the clumsily-invented myth from whom the faith of the
vulgar takes its name. Yes, and, by Heaven, the sword
came, and came to stay; and with it came ignorance and
superstition and bigotry, and cruelty and rancour and hate.
“ The Lamb of the Great Sacrifice” was hoisted on the back
of The Ass of the Great Credulity, and the Dark Ages was
the result, and the darkness of the Dark Ages flings its
penumbra upon the vaunted illumination of to-day to a
degree that he who looks upon Society conventionally
little suspects.
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
7
Not only did the “glad tidings of great joy”—O
mordant irony !—tend to the reckless and merciless waste
of life; but, by a far hotter and more real hell than any
previous faith had known, it lent new terrors to death.
Never, before Christianity was devised, was it dis
covered that there was any sting in death worth speaking
of. Ask the death-bed memories of certain sincere
Christians of the type of John Bunyan and William
Cowper, in their raving terror, how Christianity takes
away the sting from death; and, if I, like them, were a
Christian, I feel certain that my death-bed would be as
shudderingly terrible as was theirs. There are, I know,
many Christians who feel quite sure that they will “ fall
asleep in Jesus,” and who console themselves by repeating
maudlin, nauseous, and meaningless Gospel tags. They
know that the vast majority of human kind go to perdition,
but they have the despicable self-conceit to believe
that they have been selected from that overwhelming
majority, that they are members of that select few, that
mere handful, the elect, that they have “ found Jesus,’’
that they have been “ washed in the blood of the Lamb,”
and much else of canting commonplace. And, in their
selfish meanness, they feel idiotically happy—although,
practically, the whole of the rest of the world is to be lost.
And only by this intensely selfish and self-conceited
imbecility does Christianity 11 take away the sting from
death.” Plato knew how to die, ignorant of this
sting-extracting process; and so did Socrates, so did
Cato, so did Epaminondas, so did Codes, so did Caesar,
so did Julian.
He who mercilessly drowned a multitude of swine,
after, in his superstitious ignorance, he deemed he had
put devils into them, cannot be cited as a zoophilist.
Buddha and Mahomet alike insisted upon kindness to the
“lower” animals; but where did Jesus utter one word
that can be quoted enjoining upon us kindly treatment
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
of our poor non-human fellow-mortals ? We find attri
buted to him a number of fatuous utterances like,
“ I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven ”; “I and
my father are one ” ; and “ The father is greater than I.”
But he never once said : “ Be merciful to the ass ”; “ Be
kind to the dog ”; or “ Liberate the slave.” And,
consistently enough, till this hour, the countries professing
the faith that bears his name are by far the cruellest and
zoomistic in the world.
Even while I write, in Spain, the most Christian
country in Europe, a bull-fight on a more than ordinarily
*
colossal scale is being arranged, and which will involve
reeking slaughters and horrors in which the Mahometan
could never participate, and which the Buddhist would
rather die than sanction. By far the best organized and
numerically strongest section of the Church that bears
Christ’s name formulates thus, in brutal candour, in
“ The Catholic Dictionary,” published under the
imprimatur of Cardinal Vaughan: “ The brutes are
made for man, who has the same right over them that he
has over plants and stones. He may, according to the
express permission of God, given to Noe, kill them for his
food, and this without strict necessity; it must also be
lawful to put them to death or to inflict pain on them for
any good or reasonable end, such as the promotion
of man’s knowledge, health, etc., or even for the purposes
of recreation.”
There are, however, humanitarians among the Papists,
as among the Protestants, men and women nobler than,
and unconsciously in revolt against, their creed. For
instance, the Christian pietist, Frances Power Cobbe,
denounces Vivisection as “ to the last degree un-Christian ”;
and then, by a tour de force of the glaring inconsistency
to which Christian apologists are driven, she admits:
* See p. 13.
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
9
“ This abominable sentiment, and all the cruelty to man
and brute of which it has been the promoter, remains
after twenty centuries of Christianity almost unnoticed
by the churches of Christ. No moralist—so far as my
small knowledge extends, whether Catholic or Protestant
—no father, no schoolman, no casuist of later times, no
Protestant preachers, have denounced Cruelty and the
Pleasure in Pain with anything approaching to the nature
of its moral delinquency.”
Again : “ If we really accepted the precept of Love to
all and under all conditions as the supreme Divine Law,
should we not regard the sin of positively torturing and
taking pleasure in the sight of torture as the very last and
worst of offences ? Should not the early Christian
teachers, when they mapped out the Seven Deadly Sins,
have placed Cruelty the very first on the list ? What
were they doing, and what has the Church of Rome been
doing ever since, to tell us that Sloth, Covetousness, Lust,
Anger, Envy, Pride, and even Gluttony are mortal sins,
and say not one word about Cruelty to man or beast ?
Again : 11 Even our own English minds (through whole
regions of which the old Roman theology and morals still
unconsciously dribble) rarely take in the idea that the
supreme Vice is Cruelty, that while all other vices degrade
man to the level of the beast, Cruelty sinks him to that
of the fiend. When we speak of Vice commonly, we
think of sexual vice or intemperance. We do not think
of that Vice of which—so it seems to me—we must, if
guilty, repent through all the cycles of our immortality.”*
Yes, Miss Cobbe, and to this Vice of all the vices that
“ most holy religion ” of yours is not appreciably opposed,
in either theory or practice !
That truculent Romish dictum I have quoted gives
full warranty, not only to hunting our fellow-mortals to
Contemporary Review, May, 1902.
�IO
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
death for “ sport,” but gives sanction to the hideous
horrors exposed in a brochure * which I have glanced
at and closed with a shudder. Jesus was crucified to
secure our spiritual, and now, consistently enough with
that immoral and revolting proposition, dogs and cats and
rabbits and guinea-pigs are being vivisected to secure our
physical well-being. In the name of Mercy, who and
what are we that both god and dog should suffer and die
for us ? I who, till recently, was endowed with far above
the normal strength and agility, and could leap a five-bar
gate, was wont to feel more proud of the feat than that
of writing an “ At Random ” ; but I have now, through a
nerve-malady, to move cautiously, and not over steadily,
along by the aid of a staff. Yet, even were the torture
of the mouse, exhibited in figure 447, to disclose the
neurotic secret that would again make me a swift-footed
Achilles, I should, unscathed, set the “ wee bit creepin’,
timorous beastie ” free. What right have I to make his
impotency my potency, to make his woe my weal ?
In Figure 503^, these Christian vivisectionists have
actually stuck up a rabbit with a nail through each foot
and in an attitude grimly suggestive of their man-god
upon the cross. The brutal burlesque is theirs, not
mine. But in the figures on page 158, the cat, my
favourite among all the animals, is exposed in three
attitudes of vivisectional agony. I finish this at “ the
wee short hour ayont the twal,” and go to bed to pass a
sleepless night. Visions of my lost friend, the “ Prodigal
’Catalogue of apparatus and appliances for experiments with
animals, issued by F. and M. Lautenschlager, Berlin. Translated
into English by Paul Griinfeld, who was nominated at the request
of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, by the librarian of the British
Museum. The illustrations, which have been reproduced by
photographic zinco-etching, are fac-similes of the originals, and have
been placed beside the letterpress as they appear in the original
catalogue. Second Edition.—Twentieth Thousand. Printed for
The National Anti-Vivisection Society, 92, Victoria Street, London.
j
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
II
Son,” will pass before me, between my closed but
sleepless eyes and heaven’s dome filled with the awful
stars. His remains lie affectionately interred in the small
plot of garden behind my home in London, and a giant
Scots thistle from Galloway keeps vigil over his grave.
My ever tenderly remembered “ Prodigal Son,”
who was young and happy, and to whom life was
dear, yet died like a philosopher. I feel convinced that
he knew he was dying; but he died like a hero. He
knew he was dying; but he knew nothing about the sting
having been taken from death by the reputed sacrifice
of an old-time carpenter; he did not know that death had
ever had any special sting. As I nursed him, he only
looked up with a deep and tender mournfulness into my
tearful eyes. I have among “ my puir earth-born
companions and fellow mortals,” had pet pigs, pet
bullocks, pet horses, pet rats, pet sheep, pet. crows and
pet owls. I never had the self-conceit to feel myself so
superior to any of them that I presumed to regard them
as subordinates; I regarded them as friends, and (I wish
I could say the same of the human animal) not one
of them ever betrayed me.
I read inexpressible volumes of pathos in the counten
ance of my expiring feline friend. His teeth, which he had
often used upon me playfully, were visible between his
parted lips, as he panted for laborious breath. And, as
he cast upon me his last look, there was an eloquence
therein which can never be expressed in any weak words of
mine. It meant: “ Dearest friend, Saladin, my poor green
eyes, of which you were the delight, are closing. I am in
pain. It is growing dark. My one regret is, I shall see
you no more.”
I am aware that what I here express is only the
emotionalism of an intense zoophilist who sometimes feels
inclined to doubt that “ the lower animals ” are the lower
animals at all, it being difficult to get lower than the
�12
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
average J. Smith, and impossible to get lower than the
lowest J. Smith.
If, in the awful arcanum of inexorable Fate, I cannot
have my soul saved without a tortured Christ, or my body
cured without a vivisected Cat, let soul and body perish.
I am not without egoistic self-esteem; but I have
also moral self-respect, and this latter revolts at my
accepting of weal at the cost of another’s woe. Barbaric
conception of pristine savages ! If my soul cannot be
saved without another’s blood and agony—Let it be lost.
Doom, I face thee and whatever thou mayest have in
reserve for me j and I decline to escape my weird through
the anguish of a Christ on the Cross, or, through its
natural, sequence, the agony of a Cat on the “ Operation
Board.” God, whom I cannot formulate in thought, but
whom I meet in ecstatic vision, Thou wilt not permit r
me to be lost because I decline to accept of a cruel
coward’s method of being saved.
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
*
The hold the ring has on Spain is enormous. There
are four weekly journals in Madrid devoted solely to the
interests and literature of the bull-ring. There are dozensof books written on the subject, and on every day of a
fight Madrid is simply painted green with copies of the
“Programa de Espectaculos,” a four-page sheet sold fora,
penny by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hawkers.
This gives pictures of the bulls to be slaughtered on theday in question, their pedigrees and owners and short
histories of the animals, together with the names of all
the performers in the day’s spectacle. About an hour
before the time for the show to begin the picadores,
dressed in their clumsy but picturesque costume, set out
from their hotel in the Puerta del Sol for the Plaza de
Toros, about a mile away.
These gentry are mounted on fine horses, not the sorry
hacks they use in the-ring, and are followed by immense
crowds of admiring men, women, and children, who con
sider it an honour to be near the heroes.
At this time of the year the spectacle begins at about
four, earlier or later, according to the number of animals
to be killed. The scene for a couple of hours before this
time beggars description. A sense of furious struggle,
wild desire, fierce eagerness hangs over the city—comes
pouring down with the rays of the hot sun, rises with the
dust from the suffocating streets, gets into the blood of
every Madrileno, and compels him or her—for women go
to bull-fights in their thousands—to make a mad rush for
the place of slaughter.
Even if he cannot afford to enter the show—and it is
an old saying that a Spaniard will sell his shirt to go
Daily Express, May 21st, 1902.
�14
A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
to a bull-fight—to be near the ring is something. Per
haps he may hear a wounded bull bellow with rage or
a dying horse scream in his agony, and he is certain
to see the chief actors come or go.
Private carriages, with well-dressed men and daintilyclad women, electric trams succeeding each other with
amazing rapidity, each laden to the full with sweltering
humanity (or inhumanity), horse and mule trams that
use no rails, but clatter madly over the cobbles, extra
omnibuses, and open cars drawn by five, six, or eight
red-tasselled mules, all dash at full gallop for the Plaza
de Toros to turn out their loads and tear back for
more.
As the time grows short they come only part of the
way back and turn at the half-way mark to hurry on
belated stragglers. It is not gay, it is feverish, exciting,
bewildering. Men’s faces are set and keen. There is
no badinage or merriment, even if it were possible,
while thundering over the ill-paved streets. The one
idea is to get to the fight quickly. Anger is swift to the
surface, drivers are urged and sworn at, and woe be to the
wretched horse or mule that stumbles. He is greeted
with a shower of curses from roof and window of the
vehicle and flogged unmercifully by his driver.
If anyone is of opinion that bull-fighting does not
brutalize these people, let him watch the crowd that goes
to the Plaza de Toros any Sunday in Madrid. He need
not go inside the amphitheatre—he will see enough out
side to change his mind.
We are having fights nearly every day just at present.
I went to Thursday’s contest, and saw six bulls and
fifteen horses slaughtered. I was disgusted and bored,
and came away simply worn out, not with excitement,
but with a sinking stomach and fluttering heart. My
first feeling was that of anger at the men in the ring
for brutally sacrificing the poor horse, who, with his
bandaged eye on to the side towards the bull, was made
to receive broadside the cruel horns of the maddened
and worried brute. The result was sickening. The
horse was ripped open, and amidst screams of pain he
was forced to stand again with his entrails dragging on
the sand of the arena. Every step he took he trod on
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
15
his entrails, but was not allowed to lie down and die until
he could no longer bear the burden of the picador, who
urged him forward as long as possible with spurs while his
servant slashed the dying brute over the head with a
*
stick
I do not intend to describe the fight; you would
probably not publish the revolting details if I did. I
merely give one instance which was multiplied over a
dozen time with variations more loathing and gory as the
insistent crowd’s lust for blood grew with what it fed upon.
Finally, the bull, his fore part a crimson flood, spirit
exhausted, an easy victim for the cowards who were
torturing him, was put out of his misery by the matador.
For three hours this went on until the six bulls had been
dragged out dead by mules.
Bull-fighting is a cruel, soul-debasing sight. Men,
women, and children must become brutalised made
callous to suffering and pain. It must and does stamp
the character of the people who love it, and degrade
them. Many Spaniards will tell you that they do not
care for it, and never go. They wish to have the “ sport ”
stopped, but they are few compared to the millions here
who would cause civil war rather than their favourite
pastime should be abolished. In some parts of the United
States the law does not permit a butcher to sit on a jury
trying a prisoner for capital crime, because he is sup
posed to be accustomed to the sight of blood. If such a
law were in force here it would be hard to obtain a jury
in Madrid, where nearly everyone is a butcher, by proxy
s>t least
After witnessing a. bull-fight it is easy to understand
Spanish cruelty in Cuba and elsewhere, and to realise that
it was in this Spain that the Inquisition originated- You
may see to-day in Madrid the square, Plaza Mayor, where
thousands of persons were tortured and burned to death
to the great delight of the spectators crowding the bal
conies about the four sides of the square. It has changed
but little in appearance, except that the instruments of
torture have been removed a little further away to the Plaza
de Toros.
,, c u •
There are many laws in Spain regulating bull-fighting,
mostly in favour of the institution. As an example of its
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
legality, I may merely point out that should all the horses
available be killed at a corrida the law allows the managers
of the rings to go into the public streets and commandeer
the first horses at hand, paying for them, of course. There
are more than two hundred and fifty bull-rings in Spain,
About five hundred fights are held every year, in which
one thousand five hundred bulls and six thousand horses
are killed. These are average figures. It is impossible
to get any reliable figures of the expense of this national
institution, but it must be very large. Matadors of first
rank make sometimes from ^£10,000 to_^'i£)ooo a year,
and everybody finds money for the bull-fight, though
schools suffer in this country, where about fifty per cent,
of the people are illiterate.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farrin^don Street, E.C.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Vicarious suffering : our sanctions for cruelty
Creator
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes A Christian holiday, article reprinted from the Daily Express, 21 May 1902. Reprinted from the Agnostic Journal, 31 May 1902. Includes bibliographical references. Annotations in ink and pencil. "by Saladin" [title page]. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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W. Stewart & Co.
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[1902]
Identifier
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N600
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Ethics
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Vicarious suffering : our sanctions for cruelty), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
Language
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English
Bullfighting
Cruelty
NSS
Suffering
Torture