your mouths be empty of blood, and satisfied with pure
and natural repasts.

OVID. _Metam._, _lib._ xv.

That we cannot find any justification for destroying animal life for
food does not imply we should never destroy animal life. Such a cult
would be pure fanaticism. If we are to consider physical well-being as
of primary importance, it follows that we shall act in
self-preservation 'making war on noxious creatures.' But this again is
no justification for 'blood-sports.'

He who inflicts pain needlessly, whether by his own hand or by that of
an accomplice, not only injures his victim, but injures himself. He
stifles what nobleness of character he may have and he cultivates
depravity and barbarism. He destroys in himself the spirit of true
religion and isolates himself from those whose lives are made beautiful
by sympathy. No one need hope for a spiritual Heaven while helping to
make the earth a bloody Hell. No one who asks others to do wrong for him
need imagine he escapes the punishment meted out to wrong-doers. That he
procures the service of one whose sensibilities are less keen than his
own to procure flesh-food for him that he may gratify his depraved taste
and love of conformity does not make him less guilty of crime. Were he
to kill with his own hand, and himself dress and prepare the obscene
food, the evil would be less, for then he would not be an accomplice in
retarding the spiritual growth of a fellow being. There is no shame in
any _necessary_ labour, but that which is unnecessary is unmoral, and
slaughtering animals to eat their flesh is not only unnecessary and
unmoral; it is also cruel and immoral. Philosophers and
transcendentalists who believe in the Buddhist law of Karma, Westernized
by Emerson and Carlyle into the great doctrine of Compensation, realize
that every act of unkindness, every deed that is contrary to the
dictates of our nobler instincts and reason, reacts upon us, and we
shall truly reap that which we have sown. An act of brutality
brutalizes, and the more we become brutalized the more we attract
natures similarly brutal and get treated by them brutally. Thus does
Nature sternly deal justice.

'Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.'

It is appropriate in this place to point out that some very pointed
things are said in the Bible against the killing and eating of animals.
It has been said that it