There is one authority, conclusive, no doubt, only to those who admit it, conclusive only to those who believe that they can read it, to which in conclusion I dare appeal. When a bishop in the Southern States had been defending slavery, he was asked what he thought our Lord would have said, what looks He who turned and looked upon St. Peter would have cast upon a slave-mart in New Orleans, where husband was torn from wife, child from parent, and beautiful girls, with scarce a tinge of colour in them, were sold into prostitution. The answer of the bishop is not known, but I will venture on a kindred question. What would our Lord have said, what looks would He have bent, upon a chamber filled with "the unoffending creatures which He loves," dying under torture deliberately and intentionally inflicted? or kept alive to endure further torment, in pursuit of knowledge? Men must answer this question according to their consciences; and for any man to make himself in such a matter a rule for any other would be, I know, unspeakable presumption. But to anyone who recognises the authority of our Lord, and who persuades himself that he sees which way that authority inclines, the mind of Christ must be the guide of life. "Shouldest thou not have had compassion upon these, even as I had pity on thee?" So He seems to me to say, and I shall act accordingly. CHAPTER VI: JOHN RUSKIN No one who has ever read a line of Ruskin could doubt on which side his mind and heart would be ranged in the controversy over vivisection. Here was a lord of language who was also one of the great moral teachers of the world. To him the torture of a helpless animal for a scientific purpose was a defiance of religion and an insult to God. Such pursuits he declared "were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole of creation from its Maker to the lowest creature." [Picture: John Ruskin. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the collection of John Lane] He occupied the illustrious post of Slade Professor of art at Oxford when convocation voted to endow vivisection in the University and install Dr. Burdon Sanderson, the smotherer of dogs, in a laboratory set up for him. In vain did Ruskin protest against this horrible educational cancer being grafted on to the happiness, peace, and light of gracious Oxford. Convocation preferred the blight of the coward Science to the cultivation of all that was beautiful, distinguished, humane, and brave; and they reaped as they had sown, they kept the dog smotherer and lost the radiant spirit and uplifting eloquence of the inspired seer. Ruskin resigned and Oxford heard that voice of supreme nobility no more.