Chapter 3

VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

Cardinal Manning was among the early supporters of the Anti-Vivisection movement, and was a Vice-President of the National Anti-Vivisection Society till his death.

He occasionally attended meetings of the committee at my request to assist the deliberations with his good counsel, and I remember one occasion when Lord Shaftesbury came and took the chair, and both the Cardinal and my father and the Bishop of Oxford were present to assist in an important decision.

I frequently went to the Archbishop's house at Westminster to consult him; the sumptuous cathedral and palace had not then been built, and the house at the bottom of Carlisle Place had an air of cold austerity; there were no carpets on the stone staircase, and the large room in which the Cardinal received his visitors had nothing in it but a bare table and a few cushionless chairs. He accepted invitations to dinner from my father, but although he was gracious and courtly, he ate nothing, and it was understood that no attention was to be drawn to this abstinence. He cannot have eaten much anywhere, for he was extremely emaciated.

He did a great service both to the cause of anti-vivisection and to his Church in 1882. It had been spread abroad, by whom, and on what authority, I know not, that the Church of Rome had declined to support those who desired to put down cruel experiments upon animals, and had declared that animals might lawfully be treated like stocks and stones; to this shocking suggestion the Cardinal gave a decisive and authoritative denial at a meeting at Lord Shaftesbury's House on the 21st of June.

His words were as follows:--

I know that an impression has been made that those whom I represent look, if not with approbation, at least with great indulgence, on the practice of vivisection. I grieve to say that abroad there are a great many (whom I beg leave to say I do _not_ represent) who do favour the practice; but this I do protest, that there is not a religious instinct in nature, nor a religion of nature, nor is there a word in revelation, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament, nor is there to be found in the great theology which I do represent, no, nor in any Act of the Church of which I am a member; no, nor in the lives and utterances of any one of those great servants of that Church who stand as examples, nor is there an authoritative utterance anywhere to be found in favour of vivisection.

And later in the same speech he said:--

I do not believe this to be the way that the All-wise and All-good Maker of us all has ordained for the discovery of the Healing Art which is one of His greatest gifts to man.

Two years later at a Meeting at Prince's Hall on the 26th of June, 1884, with Lord Shaftesbury in the Chair, the Cardinal in a single pregnant sentence dissipated the vivisectors' constant careless confusion of the totally different moral acts of killing animals and torturing them.

"It is clear," he said, "that the words 'kill and eat,' and the dominion which the beneficent Maker of all things has given to man over the lower creatures, does not justify the infliction of exquisite torment in the name of Science."

At that time Lord Shaftesbury was the greatest representative of the Church of England and the Cardinal the acknowledged head of the Church of Rome in this country and as they earnestly agreed in condemning the practice of vivisection as wicked and abominable, it becomes impossible for those who support it to bring to its defence any authorities on conduct at all comparable with that of these two great and good men.

The Cardinal gave the impression of a consciously eminent ecclesiastic, who was determined to lift his Church into greatness in England by all lawful means in his power; his appearance was ascetic, distinguished, and memorable; he was manifestly a man of direct nobility of life, and most lofty purpose--a great statesman for his Church, leading an austere and detached life as an example in every detail for the faithful in his community--a prince of the Roman Church fulfilling his august function conspicuously and faultlessly in full view of a critical public. {16}

His care for the poor and the noble simplicity of his life found its most eloquent evidence at his death in the discovery that his entire worldly possessions amounted to sixty-eight pounds.

He had laid up his treasure where no rust and moth doth corrupt.