170 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF
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 I " 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 reXog raXeiov of secular education, when divorced from religious or moral training, is — I say it deliberately — the purest and most unmitigated selfish- ness. 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 things of the past ; when chemistry and biology shall be the ABC of a State education enforced on all; when vivisection shall be
