100th post: 'Shall I Slay?' - editorial reply by Douglas Macmillan (1884-1969)

The above letter and response was published in a short-lived Christian vegetarian periodical, entitled The Better Quest (November, 1911 edition). In the same year, Macmillan founded the society which eventually became Macmillan Cancer Support, as noted by Dr. James Gregory in Of Victorians and Vegetarians (Tauris Academic Studies, 2007).

The London Vegetarian Society published 'Shall I Slay' as a tract by Macmillan in 1909.

'Vegetarianism in the Pulpit'

From The Vegetarian News (September 1927)

Michael Fryer, who founded the important, if mostly forgotten, Crusade Against All Cruelty to Animals in 1955, wrote of "...the late Basil G. Bourchier, whose church was situated close to my home. This man rarely stood up in his pulpit without making some outspoken reference to the plight of suffering animals and man's inhumanity towards them. Far from causing people to turn away from his services, it had the opposite effect. Although his church was in size 'a young cathedral', one could not get a seat in his heyday unless one was there at least an hour before the service began."

Editorial, The Living World (Vol.1, No.1. 1970)

Rev Bourchier biography

Quotation: Ronald M. Lightowler (1959)

"While we realise that there are a great many Christians to whom our plea would be in vain, may we ask those who are Christians in heart and spirit, and not merely of the intellect, to consider well what they do, especially when they approach the Altar to make their Christmas Communion, in the light of the words of one of the beautiful prayers in the Anglican liturgy, "here we offer and present unto Thee O Lord ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a holy, reasonable and living sacrifice. . . "

Those bodies which you offer, of what are they built up, of the pure substances provided in the "kindly fruits of the earth" or of the flesh of the slaughtered creatures of the same Creator Who also created you?"

From: 'Christians Awake' - Editorial in The British Vegetarian (November/December 1959)

See also letters from 1953 and 1974

'Christ Crucified' by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

Short excerpt from her Poems of Experience (Gay & Hancock, 1910)which appeared in The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review of October 1941.

'The Animal Kingdom - Why? Whence? Whither?' by Basil Viney

A short treatise which explores the origins, nature and destiny of creation by a clergyman of the Unitarian church.

Published by James Clarke & Co. Ltd, 1965

See: Autobiography

'Christianity and Flesh-Eating' by the Rev and Hon. Edward Lyttelton: Part 1

The London Vegetarian Society published a five-part series of essays by Canon Lyttelton during the course of a year, commencing in the September 1918 edition of The Vegetarian.

I'll feature the five installments on a monthly basis.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

'The Last Wesleyan: A life of Donald Soper' by Mark Peel

Published in partnership with Scotforth Books (2008)

The author reveals:

"In 1947 he was so repelled by the smell at an Australian slaughterhouse at which he was preaching, and the chilling sight of the animals awaiting their fate, that he vowed to become a vegetarian, a pledge he kept till 1963 when, on doctors' advice, he began eating some white meat to increase his protein levels. As more literature came to light exposing the cruelty animals were subjected to, Donald became more uncompromising in their defence. He opposed the staging of the Grand National, Britain's premier steeplechase, because of the grievous - sometimes mortal - injuries sustained by some of the horses due to the challenging nature of the jumps. Then at Christmas 1955, he incurred unpopularity with his children by denying them their annual trip to the circus because of his contention that performing animals were made to suffer unnecessary pain. He even began to wear plastic shoes, after being criticised at Tower Hill for wearing leather ones, at variance with his vegetarianism." (p262)

See also: 'Quotation'