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 animalculae. 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 there may be, in this conjecture, it is evident to those who
understand the animal economy of the frame of human bodies, together
with the history, both of those who have lived abstemiously, and of
those who have lived freely, that indulging in flesh meat and strong
liquors, inflames the passions and shortens life, begets chronical
distempers and a decrepit age.

"For remedying the distempers of the body, to make a man live as long as
his original frame was designed to la