Pember also wrote very briefly about a Christian approach to animal welfare and animal rights, which was becoming a topic of great social concern in Victorian society. What Pember had to say on the subject can be understood on a wide historical canvas. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries human attitudes about the status of animals began to change as theologians and philosophers discussed whether animals were capable of rational thought, had emotions, had a soul, and questions about brutal treatment were also debated. Some theologians began to examine passages of the Bible concerned with the afterlife and the prophesied new heaven and new earth, and as those discussions developed Nathaniel Homes (1654) and Stephen Charnock (1660) argued that animals would be included in the resurrection of the dead. In the eighteenth century the debate was carried forward by both the Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler in his "Analogy of Religion" and the Anglican priest and hymn writer Augustus Montague Toplady, both believed in the resurrection of animals, while Toplady regarded brutality towards animals as sin. Other important contributors to the debate were Humphry Primatt (1776), Richard Dean (1767) and John Wesley as they each addressed the problem of brutality to animals in connection with the problem of evil and sin, while both Dean and Wesley held to the resurrection of animals.