It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the services of the Christian ministers who in a choice between dogma and reform have bravely sided with Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and spirituous poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-hunters, are trying their utmost to undo the mischief of their antinatural creed, by frankly admitting that a man can be defiled by “things that enter his mouth,” and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should be abandoned to the rites of devil-worshipers.
But the religion which pretends to inculcate a peace-making spirit of meekness has been strangely remiss in opposing the excessive use of a diet which is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that virtue. In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and North American Redskins, a chiefly carnivorous diet engenders the instincts of carnivorous beasts, and a Peace Congress celebrating its banquets with sixteen courses of flesh food might as well treat a vigilance [[72]]committee to sixteen courses of opium. “Frugality” should again be promoted in the ancient sense of the word; in a community of reformants temperance and vegetarianism should go hand in hand. Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used in the extended sense that would make it a synonym of Abstinence from all kinds of unnatural food and drink; and Dr. Schrodt’s rule should become the canon of every dietetic reform league. “Avoid,” he says, “all drinks and stimulants repulsive to the palate of an unseduced child, but also all comestibles that need artificial preparation to make them palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and caustic spices. The second would abolish many kinds of animal food, but sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other “semi-animal” substances, condemned by the extreme school of vegetarians. “From the egg to the apple,” is an old Latin phrase which proves that the frugality of the ancient Romans never went to such extremes. Milk, eggs, and vegetable fats, in their combination with farinaceous dishes, might amply replace the flesh food of the northern nations, and, considering the infinite variety of fruits and vegetables known to modern horticulture, there seems no reason why a vegetarian diet should necessarily be a monotonous one. The Religion of Nature will require the renunciation of several deep-rooted prejudices, but its path of salvation will in no sense be a path of thorns. [[73]]
CHAPTER V.
SKILL.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.
Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer [[74]]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.
Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an [[75]]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.