[1] Quoted by Sir Arthur Helps in his Animals and their Masters. (Strahan, 1873.) The further just remark of Arnold upon this subject may here be quoted:—“Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much-enduring we know them to be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future—because they have no selfish, calculated aims—these are not virtues. Yet, if we say a ‘vicious’ Horse, why not say a ‘virtuous’ Horse?”

[2] That the indescribable atrocities inflicted in the final scene of the slaughter-house, are far from being the only sufferings to which the victims of the Table are liable, is a fact upon which, at this day, it ought to be superfluous to insist. The frightful sufferings during “the middle passage,” in rough weather, and especially in severe storms, have over and over again been recounted even by spectators the least likely to be easily affected by the spectacles of lower animal suffering. Thousands of Oxen and Sheep, year by year, are thrown living into the sea during the passage from the United States alone. In the year 1879, according to the official report, 14,000 thus perished, while 1,240 were landed dead, and 450 were slaughtered on the quay upon landing to prevent death from wounds.—See, among other recent works on humane Dietetics, the Perfect Way in Diet of Dr. Anna Kingsford for some most instructive details upon this subject. The reader is also referred to the Lecture recently addressed to the Students of Girton College, Cambridge, by the same able and eloquent writer, for other aspects of the humanitarian argument.

[3] Cf. Horace (whom, however, we do not quote as an authority)—

and Virgil thus indicates the charm of a rural existence for him who realises it:—

[4] The same apparent contradiction—the co-existence of “flocks and herds” with the prevalence of the non-flesh diet—appears in the Jewish theology, in Genesis. It is obvious, however, that in both cases the “flocks and herds” might be existing for other purposes than for slaughter.

[5] Daimones. The dæmon in Greek theology was simply a lesser divinity—an angel.

[6] Compare Spenser’s charming verses (“Faery Queen,” Book ii., canto 8): “And is there care in heaven,” &c.

[7] His moral principles are reduced to these:—“1. Mercy established on an immovable basis. 2. Aversion to all cruelty. 3. A boundless compassion for all creatures.” Quoted from Klaproth by Huc, Chinese Empire, xv. Buddhism was to Brahminism, sacerdotally, what early Christianity was to Mosaism.

[8] All the varieties of the bear tribe, it is perhaps scarcely necessary to observe, are by organisation, and therefore by preference, frugivorous. It is from necessity only, for the most part, that they seek for flesh.

[9] Compare Montaigne (Essais, Book II., chap. 12), who, to the shame of the popular opinion of the present day, ably maintains the same thesis.

[10] The allegory of the trials and final purification of the soul was a favourite one with the Greeks, in the charming story of the loves and sorrows of Psyche and Eros. Apuleius inserted it in his fiction of The Golden Ass, and it constantly occurs in Greek and modern art.

[11] Beans, like lean flesh, are very nitrogenous, and it is possible that Pythagoras may have deemed them too invigorating a diet for the more aspiring ascetics. This may seem at least a more solid reason than the absurd conjectures to which we have referred.

[12] “As regards the fruits of this system of training or belief (the Pythagorean), it is interesting to remark,” says the author of the article Pythagoras in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, “that, wherever we have notices of distinguished Pythagoreans, we usually hear of them as men of great uprightness, conscientiousness, and self-restraint, and as capable of devoted and enduring friendship.” Amongst them the names of Archytas, and Damon, and Phintias are particularly eminent. Archytas was one of the very greatest geniuses of antiquity: he was distinguished alike as a philosopher, mathematician, statesman, and general. In mechanics he was the inventor of the wooden flying dove—one of the wonders of the older world. Empedokles (the Apollonius of the 5th century B.C.), who devoted his marvellous attainments to the service of humanity, may be claimed as, at least in part, a follower of Pythagoras.

[13] “Quæ Philosophia fuit, facta Philologia est.” (Ep. cviii.) Compare Montaigne, Essais, i., 24, on Pedantry, where he admirably distinguishes between wisdom and learning.

[14] The Republic of Plato. By Davies and Vaughan.

[15] In support of this thesis Plato adduces arguments derived from analogy. Amongst the non-human species the sexes, he points out, are nearly equal in strength and intelligence. In human savage life the difference is far less marked than in artificial conditions of life.

[16] Ὄψον—the name given by the Greeks generally to everything which they considered rather as a “relish” than a necessary. Bread was held to be—not only in name but in fact—the veritable “staff of life.” Olives, figs, cheese, and, at Athens especially, fish were the ordinary Ὄψον.

[17] Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 1874.

[18] The four sacred Pythagorean virtues—justice, temperance, wisdom, fortitude. See notice of Plato above.

[19] Upon which excellent maxim Hierokles justly remarks: “The judge here appointed is the most just of all, and the one which is [ought to be] most at home with us, viz.: conscience and right reason.”

[20] Nineteenth Century, October, 1877. The Greek original of the Golden Verses is found in the text of Mullach, in Fragmenta Philosophorum Græcorum. Paris, 1860.

[21] The Romans, we may remark, imported the gladiatorial fights from Spain.

[22] Hist. Naturalis VIII. 7. His nephew says of these huge slaughter-houses that “there is no novelty, no variety, or anything that could not be seen once for all.” On one occasion, in the year A.D. 284, we are credibly informed that 1,000 ostriches, 1,000 stags, 1,000 fallow-deer, besides numerous wild sheep and goats, were mingled together for indiscriminate slaughter by the wild beasts of the forest or the equally wild beasts of the city. (See Decline and Fall.)

[23] Some traces of it may be found, e.g., in Lucretius (De Rerum Nat. II., where see his touching picture of the bereaved mother-cow, whose young is ravished from her for the horrid sacrificial altar); Virgil (Æneis VII.), in his story of Silvia’s deer—the most touching passage in the poem; Pliny, Hist. Nat. In earlier Greek literature, Euripides seems most in sympathy with suffering—at least as regards his own species.

[24] I see and approve the better way; I pursue the worse.—Metam. vii., 20.

[25] In a note on this passage Lipsius, the famous Dutch commentator, remarks: “I am quite in accord with this feeling. The constant use of flesh meat (assidua κρεοφαγία) by Europeans makes them stupid and irrational (brutos).”

[26] Lipsius suggests, with much reason, that Seneca actually wrote the opposite respecting his father, “who had no dislike for this philosophy, but who feared calumny,” &c.

[27] On this melancholy truth compare Montaigne’s Essais.

[28] Ep. xxv. Lipsius here quotes Lucan “still more a philosopher than a poet”:—

“Learn by how little life may he sustained, and how much nature requires. The gifts of Ceres and water are sufficient nourishment for all peoples.”—(Pharsalia.)

Also Euripides:—

Which may be translated:—

(Fragment of lost drama of Euripides, preserved in Athenæus iv. and in Gellius vii.)

See, too, the elder Pliny, who professes his conviction that “the plainest food is also the most beneficial” (cibus simplex utilissimus), and asserts that it is from his eating that man derives most of his diseases, and from thence that all the drugs and all the arts of physicians abound. (Hist. Nat. xxvi., 28.)

[29] Cf. Pope’s accusation of the gluttony of his species:—

[30] Compare Juvenal passim, Martial, Athenæus, Plutarch, and Clement of Alexandria.

[31] Ep. cx. Cf. St. Chrysostom (Hom. i. on Coloss. i.) who seems to have borrowed his equally forcible admonition on the same subject from Seneca.

[32] Epistola vii. and De Brevitate Vitæ xiv. As to the effect of the gross diet of the later athletes, Ariston (as quoted by Lipsius) compared them to columns in the gymnasium, at once “sleek and stony”—λιπαροὺς καὶ λιθίνους. Diogenes of Sinope, being asked why the athletes seemed always so void of sense and intelligence, replied, “Because they are made up of ox and swine flesh.” Galen, the great Greek medical writer of the second century of our æra, makes the same remark upon the proverbial stupidity of this class, and adds: “And this is the universal experience of mankind—that a gross stomach does not make a refined mind.” The Greek proverb, “παχεῖα γαστὴρ λεπτὸν οὐ τίκτει νόον,” exactly expresses the same experience.

[33] De Clementiâ i. and ii. The author has been accused of flattering a notorious tyrant. The charge is, however, unjust, since Nero, at the period of the dedication of the treatise to him, had not yet discovered his latent viciousness and cruelty. Like Voltaire, in recent times, Seneca bestowed perhaps unmerited praise, in the hope of flattering the powerful into the practice of justice and virtue.

[34] Cf. the sad experiences of the great Jewish prophet. “The prophets prophesy falsely,” &c.

[35] In the original, “dumb animals” (mutis animalibus)—a term which, it deserves special note, Seneca usually employs, rather than the traditional expressions “beasts” and “brutes.” The term “dumb animals” is not strictly accurate, seeing that almost all terrestrials have the use of voice though it may not be intelligible to human ears. Yet it is, at all events, preferable to the old traditional terms still in general use.

[36] Compare the advice of the younger Pliny—“Read much rather than many books.” (Letters vii., 9 in the excellent revision of Mr. Bosanquet, Bell and Daldy, 1877) and Gibbon’s just remarks (Miscellaneous Works).

[37] See this finely and wittily illustrated in Micromégas (one of the most exquisite satires ever written), where the philosopher of the star Sirius proposes the same questions to the contending metaphysicians and savans of our planet.

[38] This essay ranks among the most valuable productions that have come down to us from antiquity. Its sagacious anticipation of the modern argument from comparative physiology and anatomy, as well as the earnestness and true feeling of its eloquent appeal to the higher instincts of human nature, gives it a special interest and importance. We have therefore placed it separately at the end of this article.

[39] Περὶ τοῦ Τὰ Ἄλογα Λογῶ Χρῆσθαι—“An Essay to prove that the Lower Animals reason.”

[40] This essay is remarkable as being, perhaps, the first speculation as to the existence of other worlds than ours.

[41] As regards this complete silence of Plutarch, it may be attributed to his eminently conservative temperament, which shrank from an exclusive system that so completely broke with the sacred traditions of “the venerable Past.” Besides, Christianity had not assumed the imposing proportions of the age of Lucian, whose indifference is therefore more surprising than that of Plutarch.

[42] See, for example, the Isis and Osiris, 49. And yet, with Francis Bacon, and Bayle, and Addison, he prefers Atheism to fanatical Superstition.

[43] Of the many eminent persons who have been indebted to, or who have professed the greatest admiration for, the writings of Plutarch are Eusebius, who places him at the head of all Greek philosophers, Origen, Theodoret, Aulus Gellius, Photius, Suidas, Lipsius. Theodore of Gaza, when asked what writer he would first save from a general conflagration of libraries, answered, “Plutarch; for he considered his philosophical writings the most beneficial to society, and the best substitute for all other books.” Amongst moderns, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and especially Rousseau, recognise him as one of the first of moralists.

[44] See Milton (Paradise Lost, xi.), and Shelley (Queen Mab).

[45] Cf. Pope:—“Of half that live, the butcher and the tomb.”—Moral Essays.

[46] Parallel Lives: Cato the Censor. Translated by John and William Langhorne, 1826.

[47] See Odyssey, xii., 395, of the oxen of the sun impiously slaughtered by the companions of Ulysses.

[48] “Hinc subitæ mortes, atque intestata Senectus.”—“Hence sudden deaths, and age without a will.” Juvenal, Sat. I.

[49]

[50] Such it seems, were some of the popular methods of torture in the Slaughter Houses in the first century of our æra. Whether the “calf-bleeding,” and the preliminary operations which produce the pâté de foie gras, &c., or the older methods, bear away the palm for ingenuity in culinary torture, may be a question.

[51] See Περὶ Σαρκοφαγίας Λόγος—in the Latin title, De Esu Carnium—“On Flesh-Eating,” Parts 1 and 2. We shall here add the authority of Pliny, who professes his conviction that “the plainest food is the most beneficial.” (Hist. Nat. xi., 117); and asserts that it is from his eating that man derives most of his diseases. (xxv., 28.) Compare the feeling of Ovid, whom we have already quoted—Metamorphoses xv. We may here refer our readers also to the celebration, by the same poet, of the innocent and peaceful gifts of Ceres, and of the superiority of her pure table and altar—Fasti iv., 395–416.

And the fine picture of Virgil of the agricultural life in the ideal “Golden Age,” in which slaughter for food and war was unknown:—

[52] “The proclamation of the birth of Apollonius to his mother by Proteus, and the incarnation of Proteus himself—the chorus of swans which sang for joy on the occasion—the casting out of devils, raising the dead, and healing the sick—the sudden disappearances and reappearances of Apollonius—his adventures in the Cave of Trophonius, and the sacred Voice which called him at his death, to which may be added his claim as a teacher to reform the world—cannot fail to suggest the parallel passages in the Gospel history.... Still, it must be allowed that the resemblances are very general, and on the whole it seems probable that the life of Apollonius was not written with a controversial aim, as the resemblances, though real, only indicate that a few things were borrowed, and exhibit no trace of a systematic parallel.”—Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography. Edited by Wm. Smith, LL.D. So great was the estimation in which he was held, that the emperor Alexander Severus (one of the very few good Roman princes) placed his statue or bust in the imperial Larium or private Chapel, together with those of Orpheus and of Christ.

[53] Cf. Virgil, Georgics II.: “Fundit humo facilem victum justissima Tellus.”

[54] So greatly was he esteemed by the later and leading Fathers of the Church that Cyprian, the celebrated Bishop of Carthage, and “the doctor and guide of all the Western Churches,” was accustomed to say, whenever he applied himself to the study of his writings, “Da mihi magistrum” (“Give me my master”).—Jerome, De Viris Illustribus I., 284.

[55] On Fasting or Abstinence Against the Carnal-Minded. The style of Tertullian, we may remark, is, for the most part, obscure and abrupt.

[56] It is worth noting that neither the original (βρωμάτων) of the “Authorised Version,” nor the meats of the “A. V.” itself, says anything about flesh-eating in this favourite resort of its apologists. Both expressions merely signify foods of any kind; so that the passage in question of this Pastoral Letter—which is apparently post-Pauline—can be made to condemn absolute fasting only: nor does the context warrant any other interpretation. As to St. Paul, the great opponent of the earlier Christian belief and practice, it must be conceded that he seems not to have shared the abhorrence of the immediately accredited disciples of Jesus for the sanguinary diet, especially of St. Matthew, of St. James, and of St. Peter, who, as we are expressly assured by Clement of Alexandria, St. Augustine, and others, lived entirely on non-flesh meats. The apparent indifferentism of St. Paul upon the question of abstinence is best and most briefly explained by his avowed principle of action—from the missionary point of view useful, doubtless, but from the point of view of abstract ethics not always satisfactory—the being “all things to all men.”

[57] Compare Seneca, Epistles, cx., and Chrysostom, Homilies.

[58] Aquis sobrius, et cibis ebrius. This important truth we venture to commend to the earnest attention of those philanthropists, or hygeists, who are adherents of what may be termed the semi-temperance Clause—who abstain from alcoholic drinks but not from flesh.

[59] A more accurate version of the original than that of the A. V. (1 Cor. viii., 8–13). We may here quote the conclusion of the argument of the Greek-Jew Apostle—“Wherefore, if [the kind of] meat is a cause of offence to my brother, I will eat no flesh while the world stands, that I may not be a cause of offence to my brother”—and press it, more particularly, upon the attention of English residents, and especially of Christian missionaries, amongst the sensitive and refined Hindus who form so overwhelming a proportion of the population of the British Empire. According to the evidence of the missionaries of the various Christian churches themselves, their habits of flesh-eating have not infrequently been found to prejudice all but the lowest caste of Hindus against the reception of other ideas of Christian and Western “civilisation.”

[60] Usque ad choleram ortygometras cruditando. In the present case it seems that the wanderers in the Arabian deserts were not so much clamorous for flesh as for some kind of sustenance, or rather for something more than the manna with which they were supplied; since the late Egyptian slaves are reported to have said, “We remember the fish that we did eat in Egypt freely—the cucumbers, the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic; but now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all besides this manna before our eyes.”

We may here take occasion to observe that the fact of the existence of sacrifice throughout their history necessarily involves the practice of flesh-eating—indeed, the two practices are, historically, clearly connected. What, however, we may fairly deduce from their simple and frugal living in the Egyptian slavery, lasting, as it did, through several centuries, during which period they must have been weaned from the gross living of their previous barbarous pastoral life, is this—that but for the sacrificial rites (and, perhaps, the necessities of the desert) the Jews would have, like other Eastern peoples, probably adopted this frugal living—of cucumbers, melons, onions, &c.—in their new homes. Such, at least, seems to be a legitimate inference from the highly-significant fact that, throughout their sacred scriptures, not flesh-meats but corn, and oil, and honey, and pomegranates, and figs, and other vegetable products (in which their land originally abounded), are their highest dietary ideal—e.g., “O that my people would have hearkened to me; for if Israel had walked in my ways.... He should have fed them with the finest wheat flour: and with honey out of the stony rock should I have satisfied thee.” (Ps. lxxxi., 17; cf. also Ps. civ., 14, 15.) It is equally significant of the latent and secret consciousness of the unspiritual nature of the products of the Slaughter-House, even in the Western world, that in the liturgies or “public services” of the Christian churches, wherever food is prayed for or whenever thanks are returned for it, there is (as it seems) a natural shrinking from mention of that which is obtained only by cruelty and bloodshed, and it is “the kindly fruits of the earth” which represent the legitimate dietary wants of the petitioners.

[61] “For they that are after the Flesh do mind the things of the Flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.... So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.... Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye, through the spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Rom. viii., 5, &c.) A more spiritual apprehension of ‘divine verities,’ if we may so say, than the apparently more equivocal utterance of the same great reformer elsewhere. Here it is well to observe, once for all that the whole significance of the utterances of St. Paul upon flesh-eating depends upon the bitter controversies between the older Jew and the newer Greek or Roman sections of the rising Church. It is, in fact, a question of the lawfulness of eating the flesh of the victims of the Pagan and Jewish sacrificial altars—not of the question of flesh-eating in the abstract at all. In fine, it is a question not of ethics, but of theological ritual. It is greatly to be lamented that the confused and obscure translation of the A. V. has for so many centuries hopelessly mystified the whole subject—as far, at least, as the mass of the community is concerned.

[62] See De Jejuniis Adversus Psychicos. (Quinti. Sept. Flor. Tertulliani Opera. Edited by Gersdorf, Tauchnitz.)

[63] In the Clementine Homilies, which had a great authority and reputation in the earlier times of Christianity, St. Peter is represented, in describing his way of living to Clement of Rome, as professing the strictest Vegetarianism. “I live,” he declares, “upon bread and olives only, with the addition, rarely, of kitchen herbs” (ἄρτῳ μόνῳ καὶ ἐλαίαις χρῶμαι καὶ σπανίως λαχάνοις xii. 6.) Clement of Alexandria (Pædagogus ii. 1) assures us that “Matthew the apostle lived upon seeds, and hard-shelled fruits, and other vegetables, without touching flesh;” while Hegesippus, the historian of the Church (as quoted by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 2, 3) asserts of St. James that “he never ate any animal food”—οὔδε εμψυχον ἔφαγε: an assertion repeated by St. Augustine (Ad. Faust, xxii. 3) who states that James, the brother of the Lord, “lived upon seeds and vegetables, never tasting flesh or wine” (Jacobus, frater Domini, seminibus et oleribus usus est, non carne nec vino). The connexion of the beginnings of Christianity with the sublime and simple tenets of the Essenes, whose communistic and abstinent principles were strikingly coincident with those of the earliest Christians, is at once one of the most interesting and one of the most obscure phenomena in its nascent history. The Essenes, “the sober thinkers,” as their assumed name implies, seem to have been to the more noisy and ostentatious Jewish sects, what the Pythagoreans were to the other Greek schools of philosophy—practical moralists rather than mere talkers and theorisers. They first appear in Jewish history in the first century B.C. Their communities were settled in the recesses of the Jordan valley, yet their members were sometimes found in the towns and villages. Like the Pythagoreans, they extorted respect even from the worldly and self-seeking religionists and politicians of the capital. See Josephus (Antiquities xiii. and xviii.), and Philo, who speak in the highest terms of admiration of the simplicity of their life and the purity of their morality. Dean Stanley (Lectures on the Jewish Church, vol. iii.) regards St. John the Baptist as Essenian in his substitution of “reformation of life” for “the sanguinary, costly gifts of the sacrificial slaughter-house.”

[64] It is a curious and remarkable inconsistency, we may here observe, that the modern ardent admirers of the Fathers and Saints of the Church, while professing unbounded respect for their doctrines, for the most part ignore the one of their practices at once the most ancient, the most highly reputed, and the most universal. Quod semper, quod ubique, &c., the favourite maxim of St. Augustine and the orthodox church, is, in this case, “more honoured in the breach than in the observance.” Partial and periodical Abstinence, it is scarcely necessary to add, however consecrated by later ecclesiasticism, is sufficiently remote from the daily frugal living of a St. James, a St. Anthony, or a St. Chrysostom.

[65] The full title of the treatise is—The Miscellaneous Collection of T. F. Clemens of Gnostic (or Speculative) Memoirs upon the true Philosophy.

[66] This celebrated term distinguished the superiority of knowledge (gnosis) of “the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name.” During the first three or four centuries the Gnostics formed an extremely numerous as well as influential section of the Church. They sub-divided themselves into more than fifty particular sects, of whom the followers of Marcion and the Manicheans are the most celebrated. Holding opinions regarding the Jewish sacred scriptures and their authority the opposite to those of the Ebionites or Jewish Christians, they agreed, at least a large proportion of them, with the latter on the question of kreophagy.

[67] History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, by K. O. Müller, continued by J. W. Donaldson, D.D., vol. iii., 58.

[68] The argument here suggested, although rarely, if ever, adduced, may well be deemed worthy of the most serious consideration. It is, to our mind, one of the most forcible of all the many reasons for abstinence. That the life even of a really useful member of the human community should be supported by the slaughter of hundreds of innocent and intelligent beings is surely enough to “give us pause.” What, then, shall be said of the appalling fact, that every day thousands of worthless, and too often worse than useless, human lives go down to the grave (to be thenceforth altogether forgotten) after having been the cause of the slaughter and suffering of countless beings, surely far superior to themselves in all real worth? To object the privilege of an “immortal soul” is, in this case, merely a miserable subterfuge. Sidney Smith calculated that forty-four wagon-loads of flesh had been consumed by himself during a life of seventy years! (See his letter to Lord Murray.)

[69] It was the fond belief of the mediating Christian writers that the best parts of Greek philosophy were derived, in whole or in part, from the Jewish Sacred Scriptures. For this belief, which has prevailed so widely, which, perhaps, still lingers amongst us, and which has engaged the useless speculation of so many minds, an Alexandrian Jew of the age of the later Ptolemies is responsible. It is now well known that he deliberately forged passages in the (so-called) Orphic poems and “Sybilline” predictions, in order to gain the respect of the Greek rulers of his country for the Jewish Scriptures. This patriotic but unscrupulous Jew is known by his Greek name of Aristobulus. He was preceptor or counsellor of Ptolemy VI.

[70] 2 Sam. vi., 19. Clement, in common with all the first Christian writers, quotes from the Septuagint version, which differs considerably from the Hebrew. The English translators of the latter, presuming that “flesh” must have formed part of the royal bounty, gratuitously insert that word in the context.

[71] Pædagogus ii. 1, “On Eating.”

[72] These works, which would have been highly interesting, have, with so many other valuable productions of Greek genius, long since perished.

[73] Miscellanies vii. “On Sacrifices.”

[74] See Plutarch’s denunciation of the very same practice of the butchers of his day, Essay on Flesh Eating. Unfortunately for the credit of Jewish humanity, it must be added that the method of butchering (enjoined, it is alleged, by their religious laws) entails a greater amount of suffering and torture to the victim than even the Christian. This fact has been abundantly proved by the evidence of many competent witnesses. The cruelty of the Jewish method of slaughter was especially exposed at one of the recent International Congresses of representatives of European Societies for Prevention of Cruelty.