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for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things;" Gen. ix, 3; the gift, however, is upon this immediate condition; "But the flesh, with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall you not eat." Again, in the law dictated by God to Moses, he says, "It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations, throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood."-Lev. iii, 17. Again; moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwellings." -Lev. vii, 26. "I will even," he declares, "set my face against that soul that eateth blood; and will cut him off from among his people: for the life of the flesh," he adds, is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar, to make an atonement for your souls."-Lev. xvii, 10, 11. [The original is lives, as the life of the flesh, not souls, for the Jews of that period did not know that they had souls, nor believed in their immortality.] The same injunction is repeated in two other verses of the same chapter; and again, in Deut. xii, 16, 23, and xv, 25. This prohibition is well known, and the wiser and better primitive christians indeed practised it, but in the modern christians, what a falling off! See Acts, xv, 28, 29, where we are told, in a letter from the apostles, "For it seemed good to the holy ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood."

A righteous man is merciful to his beast.-Prov. xii, 10.

Be not among wine-bibbers, among riotous eaters of flesh.-Prov. xxiii, 20.

He who hath shewed no mercy, shall have judg. ment without mercy.-James ii, 13.

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He who feeds on any kind of meats prohibited by the Mosaic law, with the persuasion in his mind that he may be wrong, is condemned by his conscience, for doing that which he thinks God has forbidden. -Dr. A. Clarke, on Rom. xiv. 23.

The meek and lowly Jesus entered Jerusalem rid.. ing upon an ass. Surely this example, might be expected to have some influence on his followers. One might reasonably look for some mercy, being regarded in favour of this patient beast. But, no, the modern christian has no respect for this highly honoured animal. Tho' selected by his Saviour from the rest of animals to bear him, through Jerusalem, he treats this animal with contempt and persecution.

God created all things that they might have being; and the generations of the world were healthful; and there was no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon the earth: but ungodly men, with their works and words, have called it to them, and made a covenant with it.-Wisdom i, 16.

The creator has made man to be good; otherwise he, as the beasts, whose character is designed to be ferocious, would have been furnished with claws, with fangs, with poison, or with some offensive weapon. But he is not, like other animals, provided even with defensive armour; undoubtedly with the view of his having constant recourse to the humanity of his fellow creatures, and of extending it to them in his turn. God no more makes whole nations of men jealous, envious, malignant, eager to surpass each other, ambitious, conquerors, cannibals, than he forms nations continually labouring under leprosy, purples, fever, small-pox. If you meet an individual, subject to these physical evils, impute them, without hesitation, to some unwholesome aliment on which he feeds, or

to a putrid air, which infects the neighbourhood. In like manner, when you find barbarism in a rising nation, refer it solely to the errors of it's policy, or to the influence of it's neighbours; just as in a child, to the vices of education or bad example.-St. Pierre's Arcadia. p. 194.

Thou shalt not kill.-Exod. xx, 13.

The Pythagoreans had such a strong sense of human. ity that they abstained from shedding the blood, even of animals, and from eating their flesh.

In Cambia, the indians will kill nothing, nor have any thing killed; they consequently eat no flesh, but live on roots, rice, fruits, and milk.-Fitch, in Pinkerton's Coll. vol. ix, p. 408.

Even in our times, under the Russian government, established at Kamtschatka, by an edict of the Empress Catherine, no crime whatever can be punished with death. Capt. King.

"We christians," says Octavius, in Minucius Felix, "dread the thoughts of murder, and cannot bear to look upon a carcase; and we so abhor human blood, that we abstain from that of beasts." "We are so cautious," says Tertullian, "of tasting blood, that we abstain from things strangled, and even suffocated beasts; and, therefore, when you have a mind to try whether we be Christians, you offer us pudding stuffed with blood." These, it is presumed, were what we now call black puddings; a great luxury with modern christians, in this country, at the anniversary of the birth of Christ; who himself would have disdained the filthy pollution.

In scripture, the names of animals are applied to the vessels made of the respective skins of animals; to money stamped with their appropriate figures; to human beings; and to individual societies. Thus

the bottle or vessel, out of which the ancients filled their wine, being made of an animal's skin, the wine contained in this apparent animal, was called blood, and the pouring out slaughter, as if the beast were then immediately under the operation of being killed. See Archeologiæ Atticæ, lib. vi. sec. ii, cap. 4.

Marcrobius says, the Egyptians never offered any bloody sacrifices or slaughtered animals to their gods, but worshipped them only with prayers and frankincence. Saturnal. lib. i. cap. 7.

Some Egyptians, on certain occasions, make figures of swine with meal, which, having first baked, they offered upon the altar.-Heredot. Euterpe, n.

47.

According to the vulgar notion that real animals were killed in sacrifices to God, we can in the language of Dr. A. Clarke, “look on the tabernacle and temple of Jerusalem, only as slaughterhouses, whose victims, blood, and fat, are more proper to inspire disgust than religion."

That the Supreme Being would imperiously require of mankind bloody victims, and even point out the particular animals which were to be immolated on his altar, is to me, says Dr. Geddes, highly incredible.

People must have very gross conceptions of God, to imagine that he is of so cruel a nature as to be delighted with the butchering of innocent animals; and that the stench of burnt flesh should be such "a sweet smelling savour in his nostrils," as to atone for the wickedness of men; and wicked, no doubt, they were, when they had such an atonement at hand. So that the harmless were burnt to save the hurtful; and men, the less innocent they grew, the more they destroyed the innocent beasts.-Christianity as old as the Creation, p. 78.

If the experience of the Prophet Daniel, and the authority of sacred writ may have any weight in favour of the superior nutrition and wholesomeness of a vegetable diet, the following passage, in which the experiment is detailed, will be decisive.

66 And the King appointed them, [the children of Israel] a daily provision of his meat, and of the wine which he drank so nourishing them three years, that at the end thereof they might stand before the king. Now among these were of the children of Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. But Daniel proposed in his heart, that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank; therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs, that he might not defile himself. And the prince of the eunuchs said unto Daniel, I fear my lord the King, who hath appointed you meat and you drink; for why should he see your faces worse liking than the children which are of your sort? then shall ye make me endanger my head to the King. Then said Daniel to Melzar, [the steward,] whom the prince of the eunuchs had set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days, and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink. Then let our countenances be looked on before thee, and the countenances of the children that eat of the portion of the King's meat and as thou seest, deal with thy servants. So he consented to them in this matter, and proved them ten days. And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer, and fatter in flesh, than all the children which did eat the portion of the King's meat. Thus Melzar took away the portion of their meat, and the wine that they should drink, and gave them pulse. Now at the end of the days

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