“Had Nature intended man to be an animal of prey, would she have implanted in his breast an instinct so adverse to her purpose?... Would she not rather, in order to enable him to brave the piercing cries of anguish, have wrapped his ruthless heart in ribs of brass, and with iron entrails have armed him to grind, without shadow of remorse, the palpitating limbs of agonising life? But has Nature winged the feet of men with fleetness to overtake the flying prey? And where are his fangs to tear asunder the beings destined for his food? Does the lust of carnage glare in his eye-balls? Does he scent from afar the footsteps of his victim? Does his soul pant for the feast of blood? Is the bosom of men the rugged abode of bloody thoughts, and from the den of Death rush forth, at sight of other animals, his rapacious desires to slay, to mangle, and to devour? “But come, men of scientific subtlety, approach and examine with attention this dead body. It was late a playful Fawn, who skipping and bounding on the bosom of parent Earth, awoke in the soul of the feeling observer a thousand tender emotions. But the butcher’s knife has laid low the delight of a fond mother, and the darling of Nature is now stretched in gore upon the ground. Approach, I say, men of scientific subtlety, and tell me, does this ghastly spectacle whet your appetite? But why turn you with abhorrence? Do you then yield to the combined evidence of your senses, to the testimony of conscience and common sense; or with a show of rhetoric, pitiful as it is perverse, will you still persist in your endeavour to persuade us that to murder an innocent being is not cruel nor unjust, and that to feed upon a corpse is neither filthy nor unfitting?” Amid the dark scenes of barbarism and cold-blooded indifferentism to suffering innocence, there are yet the glimmers of a better nature, which need but the life-giving impulse of a true religion and philosophy:--