So we see the scientist and the sacerdotalist, forgetting their radical differences, patching up a superficial alliance with the pious object of perpetuating the experimental torture of the laboratory. Henceforward let none say that Darwinian and Catholic are not in agreement. _Laborare est orare_ was the old saying; and now surely it should be expanded by Monsignor Vaughan and his Catholic fellow-vivisectionists into _laboratorium est oratorium_--the house of torture is the house of prayer. If it is not exactly “mercy and truth” that are met together, “righteousness and peace” that have kissed each other, still it is a beautiful and touching scene of reconciliation--this meeting of scientist and sacerdotalist over the torture-trough of the helpless animal. They might exclaim in the words of Tennyson:-- “There above the little grave, O there above the little grave, We kissed again with tears.” It seems to us as humanitarians, that, as far as Monsignor Vaughan and the Catholic vivisectionist school is concerned (it is otherwise with the scientists), it is pure waste of time to argue with them, there being a fundamental difference of opinion as to data and principles. The sole reason for discussion is to insure that the humanitarian view of the question be rightly placed before the public, and this can best be done by stating it clearly in contradistinction to the anthropocentric dogma. We do _not_ admit the assumption that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.” We view the matter in a wholly different aspect. We find ourselves born into an age which has been evolved in a gradual progress from savagery to civilization, with old-world wrongs around us, the worst of which are being slowly redeemed, century after century, by a growing spirit of brotherhood. We have never pretended that these wrongs, woven as they are into the fabric of Society, can be immediately and simultaneously righted, nor do we admit, in the case of the lower animals any more than in the case of men, that the necessity of inflicting _some_ pain confers the right to inflict _any_ pain. We insist on the undeniable tendency from barbarism to humaneness, which has already at many points bridged the gulf between man and man, and will also bridge the gulf between man and his lower fellow-creatures. Science has exploded the idea that there is any difference in kind, and not in degree only, between the human and the non-human animal; and sympathy, guided by reason, is making it more and more impossible that we should for ever treat as mere automata fellow-beings to whom we are, in fact, very closely akin. _Humane Review_, 1901. VI THE CONFESSIONS OF A PHYSICIAN[55]