“Let us openly and boldly vindicate our teaching. We are sure that they ‘who are in the flesh cannot please God.’[61] Not, surely, meaning ‘in the covering or substance of the flesh,’ but in the care, the affection, the desire for it. As for us, less grossness (_macies_) of the body is no cause of regret, for neither does God give _flesh by weight_ any more than he gives _spirit by measure_.... Let prize-fighters and pugilists fatten themselves up (_saginentur_)--for them a mere corporeal ambition suffices. And yet even they become stronger by living on vegetable food (_xerophagia_--literally, ‘eating of dry foods’). But other strength and vigour is our aim, as other contests are ours, who fight not against flesh and blood. Against our antagonists we must fight--not by means of flesh and blood, but with faith and a strong mind. For the rest, a grossly-feeding Christian is akin (_necessarius_) to lions and bears rather than to God, although even as against wild beasts it should be our interest to practice abstinence.”[62] VIII. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. DIED 220 (?) A.D. The attitude of the first great Christian writers and apologists in regard to total abstinence was somewhat peculiar. Trained in the school of Plato, in the later development of neo-platonism, their strongest convictions and their personal sympathies were, naturally, anti-kreophagistic. The traditions, too, of the earliest period in the history of Christianity coincided with their pre-Christian convictions, since the immediate and accredited representatives of the Founder of the new religion, who presided over the first Christian society, were commonly held to have been, equally with their predecessors and contemporaries the Essenes, strict abstinents from flesh-eating.[63] Moreover, the very numerous party in the Church--the most diametrically opposed in other respects to the Jewish or Ebionite Christians--the Gnostics or philosophical Christians, “the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name,” for the most part agreed with their rivals for orthodox supremacy in aversion from flesh, and, as it seems, for nearly the same reason--a belief in the essential and inherent evil of matter, a persuasion, it may be said, however unscientific, not unnatural, perhaps, in any age, and certainly not surprising in an age especially characterised by the grossest materialism, selfishness, and cruelty. But the creed of the Christian church, which eventually became the prevailing and ruling dogma, like that of the English Church at the Revolution of the sixteenth century, was a compromise--a compromise between the two opposite parties of those who received and those who rejected the old Jewish revelation.