Torture can be inflicted only by the superior.  The divine idea of a superior, is one who requires duty, and protects, helps, delivers:  our relation to the animals is that of their superiors in the family, who require labour, it may be, but are just, helpful, protective.  Can they know anything of the Father who neither love nor rule their inferiors, but use them as a child his insensate toys, pulling them to pieces to know what is inside them?  Such men, so-called of science—­let them have the dignity to the fullness of its worth—­lust to know as if a man’s life lay in knowing, as if it were a vile thing to be ignorant—­so vile that, for the sake of his secret hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with torture into the house of the innocent!  Surely they shall not thus find the way of understanding!  Surely there is a maniac thirst for knowledge, as a maniac thirst for wine or for blood!  He who loves knowledge the most genuinely, will with the most patience wait for it until it can be had righteously.

Need I argue the injustice?  Can a sentient creature come forth without rights, without claim to well-being, or to consideration from the other creatures whom they find, equally without action of their own, present in space?  If one answer, ’For aught I know, it may be so,’—­Where then are thy own rights?  I ask.  If another have none, thine must lie in thy superior power; and will there not one day come a stronger than thou?  Mayst thou not one day be in Naboth’s place, with an Ahab getting up to go into thy vineyard to possess it?  The rich man may come prowling after thy little ewe lamb, and what wilt thou have to say?  He may be the stronger, and thou the weaker!  That the rights of the animals are so much less than ours, does not surely argue them the less rights!  They have little, and we have much; ought they therefore to have less and we more?  Must we not rather be the more honourably anxious that they have their little to the full.  Every gain of injustice is a loss to the world; for life consists neither in length of days nor in ease of body.  Greed of life and wrong done to secure it, will never work anything but direst loss.  As to knowledge, let justice guide thy search and thou wilt know the sooner.  Do the will of God, and thou shalt know God, and he will open thine eyes to look into the very heart of knowledge.  Force thy violent way, and gain knowledge, to miss truth.  Thou mayest wound the heart of God, but thou canst not rend it asunder to find the Truth that sits there enthroned.

What man would he be who accepted the offer to be healed and kept alive by means which necessitated the torture of certain animals?  Would he feel himself a gentleman—­walking the earth with the sense that his life and conscious well-being were informed and upheld by the agonies of other lives?

‘I hope, sir, your health is better than it has been?’