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 is possible by judiciously selecting quotations to find the Bible support almost anything. However this may be, the following excerpta are of interest:-- 'And God said: Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for meat.'--Gen. i., 29. 'But flesh with life thereof, which is the blood thereof, ye shall not eat.'--Gen. ix., 4. 'It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations in all your dwellings, that ye shall eat neither fat nor blood.'--Lev. iii., 17. 'Ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl, or beast.'--Lev. vii., 26. 'Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.'--Lev. xvii., 14. 'The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.... They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.'--Isaiah lxv.