a wise and orderly method of eating to be a religious duty, and, though the phrase might not quite pass muster in Exeter Hall, in some sense it assuredly is so. In this wise, then, I may profess to be in touch with religion, but in no other. Questions of faith and unfaith (as the fashionable jargon has it) I have neither the ability nor the wish to discuss. It were perhaps no bad thing for the happiness of the future if the wish were as generally wanting to-day as the ability. But on the interior economy of the human frame every man has a right to his opinion. Like faith this, too, it may be said, must take its stand mainly on the evidence of things not seen; but the evidence, at least, in this case, is of a more certain and palpable nature. By what measure and system of nourishment the bodily and mental powers may best be encouraged and preserved, it is every man's duty to discover for himself. If he has any word to say thereon it is, if not his duty, at least his privilege to say it. This is one of the few points of human interest on which every man has a right to say what he thinks, and no man has a right to knock him down for saying it—provided always, of course, that what he says is based strictly on his own experience and limited strictly to his own concerns. In this one instance only, no man has the right to do unto his neighbor as he would do unto himself.
Sir Henry Thompson thinks that our forefathers did not sufficiently consider this great subject. Like Mr. Squeers, they have been, he admits, very particular of our morals. He sees a wise and lofty purpose in the laws they have framed for the regulation of human conduct and the satisfaction of the natural cravings of religious emotions. But those other cravings equally common to human nature, those grosser emotions, cravings of the physical body, they have disregarded. "No doubt," he says, "there has long been some practical acknowledgment, on the part of a few educated persons, of the simple fact that a man's temper, and consequently most of his actions, depend upon such an alternative as whether he habitually digests well or ill; whether the meals which he eats are properly converted into healthy material, suitable for the ceaseless work of building up both muscle and brain; or whether unhealthy products constantly pollute the course of nutritive supply. But the truth of that fact has never been generally admitted to an extent at all comparable with its exceeding importance." Herein were our ancestors unwise. The relation between food and virtue Sir Henry maintains (as did Pythagoras before him) to be a very close relation. His view of this relationship is not the view of Pythagoras, who, as Malvolio knew, bade man not to kill so much as a woodcock lest haply he might dispossess the soul of his grandam. Plutarch also was averse to a too solid diet, for the reason that it does "very much oppress" those who indulge therein, and is apt to leave behind "malignant relics." Sir Henry, in his turn, would not have men to be great eaters of beef, though he holds with Plutarch rather than with Pythagoras, being (so far as I can judge)
