Page:Bible testimony, on abstinence from the flesh of animals as food.pdf/11

 as something ; they only saught from them ; but in succeeding times, when man began to grow fierce like a wild beast, yea, fiercer, then first they began to kill animals, and to eat their flesh." The diet at first prescribed was declared by Infinite Wisdom 'to be very good' and it would be derogatory to his character to suppose he had erred. We cannot otherwise believe therefore, but we are justified in concluding that the dietetic principles presented to our consideration, in this first law of God to man, are adapted to ournature, preservative of our health, calculated to prolong our days upon earth, to give vigor and energy both to our physical and mental faculties, and are worthy of all acceptation.

Were we to judge of the opinions of some of our fellow Christians however, by the manner in which they speak and write on this subject, we could come to no other conclusion than that our Heavenly Father had found it necessary to abrogate one of his first laws to mankind as and had seen good to substitute another in its place, of a nature wholly different to the former. Strange as it may appear, there are, nevertheless, those to be found among professors of Christianity who have seemingly thus judged of the ways of the Almighty. Professing to believe in Revelation and in the immutability of its Author, they yet contend, particularly when reasoning in support of the carniverous habit of feeding on the mangled bodies of butchered animals, that an error, of a most serious nature, must have been committed, when man was directed to sustain his physical existence by mere vegetable food! "Morbid debility" say they, "induced by an often unfriendly state of the atmosphere, together with the labor of cultivating the ground, would necessarily require a higher, and more stimulating nutriment than the vegetable kingdom could supply." This imaginary error is supposed to have been "found out" about the time of the deluge, and as soon as