The wrong line is to attempt to answer the texts quoted as favourable to flesh-eating by pitting against them other texts as favourable to vegetarianism—a course which not only degrades the Bible into a text-book for disputants,[[49]] but also surrenders the most sacred claim of the reformed diet—viz., its appeal not to this or to that textual authority, which some thinkers accept and others deny, but to the universal principle of humanity and justice.
The right line is to show, first, that it is wholly impossible, in the face of modern knowledge and evolutional science, to maintain the old "anthropocentric" idea which regarded man as the sum and centre of the universe, a monarch for whose special benefit all else was created; and, secondly, that the ancient Hebrew scriptures, whatever be their exact significance for Christian readers (a matter with which we are not here concerned), cannot be regarded as affording any clue to the solution of modern problems which have arisen centuries later. It would be no whit more absurd to argue that negro-slavery is justifiable because it was not condemned in the Bible than to claim scriptural sanction for the cruelties of butchery because the Jews were flesh-eaters. And, indeed, such arguments have been advanced by religious people in support of slavery; we read, for example, the following in John Woolman's journal: "A friend in company began to talk in support of the slave-trade, and said the negroes were understood to be the offspring of Cain, their blackness being the mark which God set upon him after he murdered Abel; that it was the design of Providence they should be slaves, as a condition proper to the race of so wicked a man as Cain was."
But it is now time to introduce the textualist in person.
Textualist: Well, sir, I understand that you advocate vegetarianism. What sort of a religion is that?
Vegetarian: The real sort—the sort that has to be practised as well as preached.
Textualist: If it is the real sort, the proof is easy. Show me the passages in the Book.
Vegetarian: I beg to be excused. I do not bandy texts.
Textualist: What? You can produce no verses in support of your religion? I thought vegetarians relied on what they call the "Ten Best Texts," and here I stand ready to meet them with five-and-twenty better ones.
Vegetarian: I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am not one of the text-quoting vegetarians. I regard all such methods of reasoning as wholly irrelevant. There is not the least doubt that the Jews were a flesh-eating people; indeed, the very idea of vegetarianism (that is, a deliberate and permanent disuse of flesh-food for moral and hygienic reasons) was wholly unknown to them. What, then, can be the use of hunting up Bible-texts which do not refer, one way or the other, to the point at issue?
Textualist: But if it was unknown and unmentioned in the Bible, what hope for vegetarianism? It perishes like all else that is unscriptural.