er of what is thus called
civilization, we have gone from a diet which scarcely required the use
of animal food in order to render it both palatable and healthful, to
one in whose dishes it is generally blended in some one or more of its
forms, must we not expect that a still further progress in the same
course will render the same kind of diet still more indispensable? If
flesh, fish, fowl, butter, cheese, eggs, lard, etc., are much more
necessary to us now, than they were a thousand years ago, will they not
be still more necessary a thousand years hence?

I do not see how we can avoid such a conclusion. And yet such a
conclusion will involve us in very serious difficulties. In Japan and
China--the former more especially--if the march of civilization should
be found to have rendered animal food more necessary, it has at the same
time rendered it less accessible to the mass of the population. The
great increase of the human species has crowded out the animals, even
the domestic ones. Some of the old historians and geographers tell us
that there are not so many domestic animals in the whole kingdom of
Japan, as in a single township of Sweden. And must not all nations, as
society progresses and the millennium dawns, crowd out the animals in
the same way? It cannot be otherwise. True, there may remain about the
same supply as at present from the rivers and seas, and perchance from
the air; but what can these do for the increasing hundreds of millions
of such large countries? What do they for Japan? In short, if the
reasoning above were good and valid, it would seem to show that
precisely at the point of civilization where animal food becomes most
necessary, at precisely that point it becomes most scarce.

These things do not seem to me to go well together. We must reject the
one or the other. If we believe in a millennium, we must, inevitably,
give up our belief in animal food, at least the belief that its
necessity grows out of the increasing wants of society. Or if, on the
other hand, we believe in the increasing necessity of animal food, we
must banish from our minds all hope of what we call a millennium, at
least for the present.

IX. THE BIBLE ARGUMENT.

It is not at all uncommon for those who find themselves driven from all
their strong-holds, in this matter, to fly to the Bible. Our Saviour ate
flesh and fish, say they; and the God of the New Testament, as well as
of the Old, in this and other ways, not only p