TEXTUALIST: Then you have not a single text to set against the injunction with which I confront you? VEGETARIAN: Not one—unless it be, "Answer not a fool according to his folly." To repel texts with texts is a futility to which vegetarians as a body have fortunately not committed themselves, because vegetarianism appeals, without reference to religion, to the common sentiment of humaneness, and numbers amongst its adherents men of every nationality and creed. If biblical vegetarians have engaged in controversy with biblical flesh-eaters, that is their own concern; and we may rest assured that the battle will be a sham one, as the firing is with blank cartridge on both sides. Apart, however, from such irrational argument, there is a sense in which an appeal may be fairly made to the Bible, as to any other great ethnical scripture or world-literature—that is, to the spirit, as distinguished from the letter, the context as distinguished from the text. That vegetarians, preaching and practising a doctrine of love and humaneness, should quote, "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed ... to you it shall be for meat," as indicating the ideal primitive diet, and "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain," as prophetic of the ideal future, is just and appropriate, for such passages, though dealing with poetry rather than fact, are far more suggestive than any textual evidence; and when we come to ask what is the spirit of the New Testament towards such instincts as that from which vegetarianism springs—the desire to increase the happiness and lessen the suffering of all sentient life—it is plain that here, at least, the vegetarian is on unassailable ground. But the answer to the biblical flesh-eater lies still nearer at hand. For the moment any attempt is made by him to ally the modern religious spirit with the maintenance of the slaughter-house, the incongruity of his position is revealed. Take "grace before meat," for instance, and note the flat impiety of offering thanks to God over the body of a fellow-being that has been cruelly slaughtered for the sake of our "pleasures of the table." As Leigh Hunt has remarked: "It is not creditable to a thinking people that the two things they most thank God for should be eating and fighting. We say grace when we are going to cut up lamb and chicken, and when we have stuffed ourselves with both to an extent that an orang-outang would be ashamed of; and we offer up our best praises to the Creator for having blown and sabred his 'images,' our fellow-creatures, to atoms, and drenched them in blood and dirt. This is odd. Strange that we should keep our most pious transports for the lowest of our appetites and the most melancholy of our necessities; that we should never be wrought up into paroxysms of holy gratitude, but for bubble-and-squeak or a good-sized massacre!"