Pastor Pleaded for Dumb Animals

1901

Rev. Dr. Spalding, Who Preached First Sermon in America on This Theme, Urges Mercy to Beasts

Rev. Dr. George B. Spalding of the First Presbyterian Church yesterday morning preached a sermon on "Cruelty to Animals" in response to a request from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which asked the ministers of the city to preach upon the topic. The sermon, which was of especial interest, was heard by a large congregation.

Dr. Spalding said that religion, in the commandments and the beatitudes, takes in God and man and every living thing.

Dr. Spalding spoke in particular of the law of Sabbath rest in the Fourth Commandment, which he said was the most tenderly humane law of the decalogue, which God intended should apply not only to "every son and daughter of mankind aching, breaking under the strain of the ceaseless toil of the week; but more than this, rest for the cattle which share man's work and strain and suffering."

Turning from the decalogue of the Old Testament to the beatitudes of the New, Dr. Spalding said the same union of heavenly and earthly relations was to be found.

"The beatitude 'Blessed are the merciful,'" he said, "stands like a queen among the sisterhood of royal blessings. There is no humanity without such mercy; there is no religion without such mercy; there is no love to God without a love which takes on this mercy towards man and bird and beast." He then continued:

"I look back to-day on forty years of ministry. It is my satisfaction that I have ministered to many a human want and spoken in defense of many of my fellows' rights, and perhaps in some way have lessened 'man's inhumanity to man,' but I rejoice with a special joy that early in my ministry I preached a sermon on 'The Rights of Animals' which has been registered as the first sermon on the subject ever preached in America.

Tail Hocking and Pigeon Shooting

"But how much, how very much remains to be done before men and even women will be truly merciful. The very hardest task still remains to be accomplished — to win society, to win fashion to humanity and mercifulness. What shall we say when the slaughter of pigeons by the thousands and the slow dying of many of them with legs and wings shot away is still the spectacle of the meetings of the shooting clubs made up of wealthy and intelligent men of the State? What shall we say when the fashion of the day demands that the horses shall be maimed and tortured before they be counted fit for public display in the market and street?

"Oh, gentlemen, oh, tender women, how long shall the awful cruelty toward these your friends escape your better thought, your natural sensibility? There are those who mock at such sentiments as weak, as womanly. They would brush it all away by affirming that no great pain is really inflicted. I know of what I am speaking. With my own eyes I have witnessed the whole awful process of torture extending through days. I have seen the sweating agony which these noble creatures suffer to make them meet the style which a merciless fashion inexorably demands.

"Is sensitiveness to such distress a turn of flabby nerve? and moral cowardice? I take refuge from such a charge in the lives of the poet, the truth of which has been proved on battlefields and shell swept decks and in the face of death in its grimmest forms:

'The bravest are the tenderest —
The loving are the daring.'"

—The Post-Standard, Syracuse, New York, May 13, 1901, p. 7.