By The Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

Sermon preached in the Chapel of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and subsequently published in The Expository Times, vol. 110, no. 9, June 1999.

Enter Harris Manchester College in Oxford by the main entrance, go into the foyer, turn right and walk to the end of the corridor. There you will find a collection of wall memorials. The first of these is to a person called Frances Power Cobbe, 1822-1904. And the inscription reads: ‘Writer on philosophy and religion and a pioneer in social reform’. The memorial was presented to the College by Mrs S. Woolcott Browne in 1908, four years after Cobbe’s death.

Hardly anyone nowadays has heard of Frances Power Cobbe. And to the students who pass by the austere marbled countenance of this Victorian woman, I fear she appears a relic of a bygone age. And yet this woman, and the causes that she made her own, speak not only to our time but are a marker for generations to come. And what were these causes? Nothing less than the rights of children, equal opportunities for women, the eradication of poverty, and last but not least the rights of animals.

Yes, Harris Manchester College has the privilege of housing the only known memorial to the indisputably leading Victorian crusader for the rights of animals. And what a crusade it was! Together with Dr George Hogan, Lord Shaftesbury and Cardinal Manning, she founded in 1876 the Victoria Street Society, the first anti-vivisection society in the world. The cause of saving animals from what she called ‘scientific cruelty’ dominated the last twenty-five years of her life.

What drove Cobbe on from what could have been a life of ease to a life of immense self-sacrifice was what we now call ‘philanthropy’, indeed ‘Victorian philanthropy’ to boot. And it has become fashionable, even politically correct, to disparage philanthropy as an inferior forerunner to contemporary notions of justice.

It has to be said that anyone reading Cobbe’s work with its flowery vocabulary and its consistently high minded tone might gain the impression, however erroneously, that being subject to this philanthropy was not an entirely unmixed blessing. But this would be to parody — style and sentiment apart, Cobbe got the substance right.

And the substance is this: the weak, the vulnerable, the unprotected, the undefended, and the morally innocent make a special claim upon us. There is, as Cardinal Newman saw, something profoundly Christ-like about the innocent suffering of both children and animals.

They are the paradigm cases. The weak and the vulnerable demand of us not equality of treatment or equal consideration of interests, but more than equal treatment, more than equal consideration, more than equal concern. In short: the weak should have moral priority.

Cobbe’s great friend, mentor, and ally was Lord Shaftesbury. Indeed Cobbe said of him after his death: ‘Lord Shaftesbury never joined the Victoria Street Society, it was the Society which joined Lord Shaftesbury’. And Cobbe would have unreservedly endorsed these moving words which sum up for him and for her their life’s work:

I was convinced that God had called me to devote whatever advantages He might have bestowed upon me to the cause of the weak, the helpless, both man and beast, and those who have none to help them … Whatever I have done has been given to me; what I have done I was enabled to do; and all happy results (if any there be) must be credited not to the servant, but to the great Master who led and sustained him.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that like Shaftesbury, Cobbe had grasped the Christian gospel in a form which still continues to elude the churches today: what might be termed not ‘philanthropy’ but moral generosity, indeed as I have dubbed it elsewhere ‘the Christ-like paradigm of inclusive moral generosity’. Jesus is, after all, the one who washes the dirty feet of his disciples, heals those suffering from mental and spiritual oppression, and who associates with the outcasts, the sinners, the disadvantaged and the poor — in short, all those normally beyond the range of human concern.

Many people fighting for the rights of animals today have to face the charge that human interest necessitates the sacrifice of animals even by cruel means. But what Cobbe would have lamented is how limited our understanding of human ‘interest’ has become. The point once grasped is unassailable, and it is this: no human interest is benefited by cruelty inflicted on the weak and vulnerable. Here you have in all its dazzling simplicity the heart of Cobbe’s anti-vivisectionism: a world in which cruelty to animals goes unchecked is bound to be a morally unsafe world for human beings.

Underlying Cobbe’s crusade against cruelty was a deeply held theological perception of animals as God’s creatures. What most worried her was the emergence of a scientific humanity without moral limits.

Human beings had, in her view, begun to deify themselves: to think of themselves as gods and the whole creation as existing solely for their use and pleasure. Vivisection was for her ‘idolatry’ because it implied the worship of humanity: the idea that only humans are worth anything in the world and that anything could be justified so long as humans benefited.

The power of Cobbe’s critique could not be more relevant at a time of seemingly unlimited genetic manipulation of animals: through control of DNA, the stuff of life, we now presume to redesign animals for our convenience so that they become bigger and better meat machines or laboratory tools.

Cloning, embryo transfer, artificial insemination, genetic manipulation are the means through which humans now exercise more and more absolute, god-like power over the animal world. And yet we have less and less sense of our own fallibility. There is so much in the Christian tradition about the sinfulness, infidelity, wickedness and violence of the human species that I do not know how Christians can so uncritically accept every claim to more and more human domination of the earth.

Perhaps the only fully effective corrective is a theological one: a recognition that we are not God; it is not our world, animals are not machines, commodities, tools, resources, here for us or means to human ends, rather animals are our fellow creatures. Their value is simply not dependent upon their usefulness to us.

Cobbe combined a deeply held belief in God with a deep distrust of religion. Deep belief and deep distrust. Her critical explorations led her to become a Unitarian by convincement; her mentor and guide was the then Principal, James Martineau.

Her distrust of doctrinal Christianity is not surprising; she narrates in her autobiography how religion had the capacity to both liberate and enslave. And she was particularly concerned with the way in which doctrinal positions led — not to more — but to less empathy with suffering children, oppressed women, the so called undeserving poor, and of course for the rights of animals.

And how right she was. In my view no theology which desensitises us to suffering can truly be called Christian theology — that is, theology centred on the cross of Christ understood as God’s identification with innocent suffering. There is a moral criterion for Christian belief and it is this: have we become more loving, gentle, sensitive, kind, generous as a result? If we must not deify humanity, still less must we deify religion. How Cobbe would have liked the line from Martin Buber: ‘Nothing so hides the face of God as religion,’ or in the even more trenchant words of Paul Tillich: ‘Any religion which cannot admit that it may be demonic, is demonic.’ Only God can require our unconditional loyalty. There is a theological duty to be critical of all religious traditions.

Cobbe was of course a difficult person. All pioneers are. I am reminded of that line to the effect that there are two sorts of people in the world: saints and martyrs. Saints are the people who try to do good, martyrs are the people who have to live with them. Cobbe was a woman of towering vision, uncompromising integrity, and frightening resolve. J. Estlin Carpenter said of her at her Memorial Service in this Chapel in April 1904 — and without a hint of understatement — she ‘concealed no principle, evaded no difficulty, withheld no conviction.’

It is to Harris Manchester’s everlasting credit that Cobbe found a spiritual home here, and doubtless too the many martyrs who had to live with her. Perhaps the best memorial to Cobbe is not found in the College but just outside it. Outside Manchester’s main entrance above the stone arches is engraved the College’s incomparable motto: ‘To Truth, Liberty, Religion’; ‘and in that order’ I hear someone say.