Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/576

552 often to eat, what to eat, what to avoid eating? And as we can do no work seriously without regarding the necessary order of sequence, so also we cannot fast without knowing where to begin,—with what to commence temperance in food.

Fasting! And moreover the analysis of how to fast, and where to begin. This notion seems ridiculous to the majority of men.

I remember how once an evangelical preacher who was attacking monastic asceticism and priding himself on his originality said to me, "My Christianity is not concerned with fasting and privations, but with beefsteaks." Christianity, or virtue in general—with beefsteaks!

During that long period of darkness and of the absence of all guidance, heathen or Christian, so many wild, immoral ideas got infused into our life, especially into that lower region concerning the first steps toward a good life,—our relation to food, to which no one paid any attention,—that it is difficult for us even to understand the audacity and senselessness of upholding Christianity or virtue with beefsteaks.

We are not horrified by this association solely because a strange thing has befallen us. We look and see not; listen and hear not. There is no bad odor, no sound, no monstrosity, to which man cannot become accustomed, so that he ceases to remark that which would strike a man unaccustomed to it. Precisely so it is in the moral region. Christianity and morality with beefsteaks!

A few days ago I visited the slaughter-house in our town of Tula. It is constructed according to the new and improved system practised in large towns, with a view to the animals suffering as little as possible. It was on a Friday, two days before Trinity Sunday. There were many cattle there.

Long before this, when reading the excellent book, "The Ethics of Diet," I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the truth of the matter brought in question when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as