SHALL WE SLAY TO EAT?
Vegetarianism is not a modern fad or cult. From the earliest ages down to the present it has been practised by the larger proportion of the human family, and at the present time, taking the race as a whole, there are, without doubt, four or five vegetarians to every flesh eater. Almost from the dawn of history there have been those who have stoutly defended the practise of vegetarianism, and who have earnestly maintained the physical and ethical error of flesh eating.
The Golden Age.Hesiod, eight centuries before Christ, pictured the "golden age" in which flesh foods were unknown. As the result of this simple and natural fare, the people of the golden age, according to this writer, enjoyed the happy state which the poet describes in the following lines:—
" Like gods, they lived with calm, untroubled mind,
Free from the toil and anguish of our kind,
Nor did decrepit age misshape their frame."
The Pythagorean Philosophy.Pythagoras, who lived in the fifth century before the Christian era, was perhaps the most enthusiastic of all ancient defenders of a natural dietary. To demonstrate his faith in the reforming influences of a non-flesh dietary, it is said that he tamed a formidable bear which had become the terror of the country round, and by subjecting it toa simple, non-flesh dietary, rendered it amiable and harmless for the remainder of its life. In the following translation from the Latin poet Ovid, the reader will find[5]
