Both these clashing theories are espoused by Pope with equal confidence, but the greatest prominence is given to the theory that social love was perfect in the patriarchal times. The whole of the sentient world was included in the happy brotherhood. The human race were the companions of the beasts, and walked, fed, and slept with them. The disastrous circumstance which broke up the reign of universal love was the craving of man for animal food. He yielded to the temptation to eat flesh, and from a meek, was changed into a pugnacious, sanguinary creature. The inflammatory diet generated the "fury passions," till then unknown, and "turned man on man."[872] "Force" was now employed to make "conquests," and war and rapine were introduced.[873] Pope once more lapses into his habitual contradictions. He represents the patriarchs as teaching their families to "draw monsters from the abyss," and "fetch the eagle to the ground" during the innocent era when the lives of beasts were held sacred.[874] He has thus adopted two opposite versions of the patriarchal treatment of the animal creation, and the later version, which teaches that the slaughter of animals was prevalent under the reign of love and virtue, is inconsistent with his genealogy of the "fury passions." He has likewise two opposite opinions on the destruction of brutes,--the one, that to take their lives was murder; the other, that the art of killing them was among the laudable discoveries which entitled the patriarchs to be esteemed "a second Providence" by their children.[875] Pope has not done with his contradictions. "It might, perhaps," he says in his first epistle, "appear better for us that all were harmony and virtue, and that never passion discomposed the mind." "But all," he replies, "subsists by elemental strife, and passions are the elements of life," which, he urges to show the necessity for the "fierce ambition" of Cæsar, and the misdeeds of Borgia and Catiline.[876] In the third epistle we are told that "the virtue and harmony" actually lasted for many generations, that the strife of bad passions was not in the slightest degree requisite for sustaining the system established on earth, and that the aggressive vices of Cæsars, Catilines, and Borgias were only the pernicious consequence of eating meat.