rs had taught him one
special personal lesson which, above all others, he had laid
to heart. A minute study of the nervous system, and of the
various forms of pain produced by wounds had inspired in him
one profound resolution; and that was--what think
you?--never, under any circumstances, to adventure his own
person into the field of battle! I have somewhere read in a
book--a rather antiquated book, I fear, and one much
discredited by modern lights--the words, "the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Truly
we read these words with a new meaning in the present day!
"Groan and travail" it undoubtedly does still (more than
ever, so far as the brute creation is concerned); but to
what end? Some higher and more glorious state? So one might
have said a few years back. Not so in these days. The
_telos teleion_ of secular education, when divorced
from religious or moral training, is--I say it
deliberately--the purest and most unmitigated selfishness.
The world has seen and tired of the worship of Nature, of
Reason, of Humanity; for this nineteenth century has been
reserved the development of the most refined religion of
all--the worship of Self. For that, indeed, is the upshot of
it all. The enslavement of his weaker brethren--"the labour
of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do
not labour"--the degradation of woman--the torture of the
animal world--these are the steps of the ladder by which man
is ascending to his higher civilisation. Selfishness is the
key-note of all purely secular education; and I take
vivisection to be a glaring, a wholly unmistakable case in
point. And let it not be thought that this is an evil that
we can hope to see produce the good for which we are asked
to tolerate it, and then pass away. It is one that tends
continually to spread. And if it be tolerated or even
ignored now, the age of universal education, when the
sciences, and anatomy among them, shall be the heritage of
all, will be heralded by a cry of anguish from the brute
creation that will ring through the length and breadth of
the land! This, then, is the glorious future to which the
advocate of secular education may look forward: the dawn
that gilds the horizon of his hopes! An age when all forms
of religious thought shall be thi