And as to a permission to Noah and his descendants, the Jews, to use animal food--was it not for the hardness of the human heart, as our Saviour calls it? From the beginning, was it so? Is not man, in the first chapter of Genesis, constituted a vegetable-eater? Was his constitution ever altered? And if so, when and where? Will they who fly to the Bible for their support, in this particular, please to tell us? But it is idle to go to the Bible, on this subject. I mean, it is idle to pretend to do so, when we mean not so much. Men who _incline_ to wine and other alcoholic drinks, plead the example and authority of the Bible. Yet you will hardly find a man who drinks wine simply because he believes the Bible justifies its use. He drinks it for other reasons, and then makes the foolish excuse that the Bible is on his side. So in regard to the use of flesh meat. Find a man who really uses flesh or fish _because_ the Bible requires him to do so, and I will then discuss the question with him on Bible ground. Till that time, further argument on this direction is unnecessary. CONCLUSION. But I must conclude this long essay. There is one consideration, however, which I am unwilling to omit, although, in deciding on the merits of the question before us, it may not have as much weight--regarded as a part of the moral argument--on every mind, as it has on my own. Suppose the great Creator were to make a new world somewhere in the regions of infinite space, and to fit it out in most respects like our own. It is to be the place and abode of such minerals, vegetables, and animals as our own. Instead, however, of peopling it gradually, he fills it at once with inhabitants; and instead of having the arts and the sciences in their infancy, he creates every thing in full maturity. In a word, he makes a world which shall be exactly a copy of our own, with the single exception that the 800,000,000 of free agents in it shall be supposed to be wholly ignorant in regard to the nature of the food assigned them. But the new world is created, we will suppose, at sunrise, in October. The human inhabitants thereof have stomachs, and soon, that is, by mid-day or before night, feel the pangs of hunger. Now, what will they eat?