Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

and strong liquors to satisfy them; nor those cruel and hard hearts, or those diabolical passions, which could easily suffer them to tear and destroy their fellow-creatures; at least, not in the first and early ages, before every man had corrupted his way, and God was forced to exterminate the whole race by an universal deluge, and was also obliged to shorten their lives from nine hundred or one thousand years to seventy. He wisely foresaw that animal food and artificial liquors would naturally contribute toward this end, and indulged or permitted the generation that was to plant the earth again after the flood the use of them for food; knowing that, though it would shorten their lives and plait a scourge of thorns for the backs of the lazy and voluptuous, it would be cautiously avoided by those who knew it was their duty and happiness to keep their passions low, and their appetites in subjection. And this very era of the flood is that mentioned in holy writ for the indulgence of animal food and artificial liquors, after the trial had been made how insufficient alone a vegetable diet--which was the first food appointed for human kind after their creation--was, in the long lives of men, to restrain their wickedness and malice, and after finding that nothing but shortening their duration could possibly prevent the evil. "It is true, there is scarce a possibility of preventing the destroying of animal life, as things are now constituted, since insects breed and nestle in the very vegetables themselves; and we scarcely ever devour a plant or root, wherein we do not destroy innumerable animalculæ. But, besides what I have said of nature's being quite altered and changed from what was originally intended, there is a great difference between destroying and extinguishing animal life by choice and election, to gratify our appetites, and indulge concupiscence, and the casual and unavoidable crushing of those who, perhaps, otherwise would die within the day, or at most the year, and who obtain but an inferior kind of existence and life, at the best. "Whatever