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Animal Rights History Timeline » [1837-1901] Victorian Age » Spectator Magazine

Charles Frizell

Clergy and Vivisection

letter to the lditor, Spectator

[1884-Feb-23] Rev. Charles William Frizell, letter to the editor, "The Clergy and Vivisection," Spectator Magazine 57 (1884 Feb 23): 250; Online at Animal Rights History, 2003.

THE CLERGY AND VIVISECTION

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR"]

SIR,—This morning when the Spectator arrived, I was engaged in putting some thoughts together for the evening's sermon. On opening your journal, my eyes chanced to rest for the moment on "D.G.'s" letter; and it afforded me no slight amusement that I could have told him just then, had he been within ear-shot, how the very subject I had chosen for the sermon in question was that special one on which he so wrathfully declares the pulpit is universally silent. So I hope "D. G." will not say again,—"I have never heard, and I have never met any one who has ever heard, a single sentence in a single sermon, by either Roman Catholic or Protestant, inculcating mercy to animals." The "sæva indignatio" may sometimes be too testy to be true.

All the while, I most heartily join in the Spectator's earnest protest against the apathy displayed by too many of my brother-clergy on the other side of the Channel with regard to the recent vote for the physiological laboratory at Oxford. Contrasted with the late "ugly rush" they made at Mr. Horton, it showed not well, for it exhibited a melancholy partiality for camels and an unnecessary disgust at gnats, which one had grown to hope in these days was not the tendency of the clerical appetite. Somehow or another, it always seems as if we parsons were fated to lose our heads when a crises comes, since then it too often happens we do the things we ought not, while those things we ought to do we strangely leave undone.—I am, Sir, &c., CHARLES WILLIAM FRIZELL. Dunluce Rectory, County Antrim, February 17th.