Before Pember wrote about animal rights there had already been many Christians in England involved in protesting against the maltreatment of domestic animals, agitating for legislation against cruelty to animals, and in rejecting the practice of the scientific dissection of living animals called vivisection. An early but failed attempt to pass a Bill against cruelty to animals was initiated by Thomas Erskine (1750–1823). He was a Christian who served in the House of Lords and was also Lord Chancellor in England. In 1809 Erskine "introduced into the Lords a Bill for the prevention of malicious and wanton cruelty to animals". Although Erskine's bill was rejected in the House of Commons, a later legislative attempt to punish acts of cruelty to animals was successfully passed by England's parliament in 1822. The architect of that 1822 legislation was the Irish Christian politician Richard Martin. Two years after the passage of Martin's anti-cruelty legislation, a meeting was called on 16 June 1824 for the formation of an organisation to oppose animal cruelty. With the exception of Lewis Gompertz who was a Jew, everyone else who attended the meeting were professing Christians and a new organisation was founded. The principal founding figures were Rev. Arthur Broome, William Wilberforce, Richard Martin and Thomas Fowell Buxton, and the organisation they created became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England. Alongside the activities of organisations like the RSPCA, there was a steady stream of books where Christians argued for animal welfare and animal rights, and most writers linked animal rights to theological topics such as whether animals have a soul, that brutality is sin, and if they will be included in the general resurrection of the dead.