The Project Gutenberg eBook, Great Testimony, by Stephen Coleridge

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Title: Great Testimony
against scientific cruelty

Author: Stephen Coleridge

Release Date: July 16, 2008 [eBook #26074]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT TESTIMONY***

Transcribed from the 1918 John Lane edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

[Picture: Presentation slip from the edition transcribed]

GREAT TESTIMONY
AGAINST SCIENTIFIC CRUELTY
:: COLLECTED AND EDUCED BY ::
THE HONBLE. STEPHEN COLERIDGE
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVIII

[Picture: Thomas Carlyle. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the
collection of John Lane]

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND

PREFACE

If the support of great and good men, famous throughout Christendom, will
avail to justify a cause, then indeed we who would utterly abolish the
torture of animals by vivisection can never be put out of countenance.

Difficult would it be indeed to bring together the authority of so many
resounding reputations against any other act of man, since slavery was
abolished.

The poets, philosophers, saints and seers of England have united to
anathematise it as an abomination, and as a deed only possible to a
craven.

It seems strange that in the face of such authentic condemnation the
horrid practice has not disappeared off the face of the civilised earth,
until it is observed that it has received the shameless support of
science, which for two generations has usurped an authority over conduct
for which it possesses no credentials. The modern prostration of mankind
before science is a vile idolatry. In the realm of ethics science is not
constructive but destructive. It exalts the Tree of Knowledge and
depresses the Tree of Life.

How is the character of man elevated or purified by all the mad