“I understand by it that the young girl should have the proper nourishment of a child—that she should continue the mild, tranquilising, unexciting regimen of milk; that, if she eats at your table, she will be accustomed not to touch the dishes upon it, which for her, at least, are poisons.
“A revolution has taken place. We have quitted the more sober French regimen, and have adopted more and more the coarse and bloody diet of our neighbours, appropriate to their climate much more than to ours. The worst of it all is that we inflict this manner of living upon our children. Strange spectacle! To see a mother giving her daughter, whom but yesterday she was suckling at her breast, this gross aliment of bloody meats, and the dangerous excitant wine! She is astonished to see her violent, capricious, passionate; but it is herself whom she ought to accuse as the cause. What she fails to perceive, and yet what is very grave, is that with the French race, so precocious, the arousing of the passions is so directly provoked by this food. Far from strengthening, it agitates, it weakens, it unnerves. The mother thinks it fine (plaisant) to have a child so preternaturally mature. All this comes from herself. Unduly excitable, she wishes her child to be such another as she, and she is, without knowing it, the corruptress of her own daughter.
“All this [unnatural stimulation] is of no good to her, and is little better for you, Madame. You have not the heart, you say, to eat anything in which she has no share. Ah, well! abstain yourself, or, at all events, moderate your indulgence in this food, good, possibly, for the hard-worked man, but fatal in its consequences to the woman of ease and leisure—regimen which vulgarises her, perturbs her, renders her irritable, or oppresses her with indigestion.
“For the woman and the child it is a grace—an amiable grace (grâce d’amour)—to be, above all things, frugivorous—to avoid the coarseness and foulness (fétidité) of flesh-meats, and to live rather upon innocent foods, which bring death to no one (qui ne coûtent la mort à personne)—sweet nourishment which charms the sense of smell as much as it does the taste. The real reason why the beloved ones in nothing inspire in us repugnance but, in comparison with men, seem ethereal, is, in a special manner, their [presumed] preference for herbs and for fruits—for that purity of regimen which contributes not a little to that of the soul, and assimilates them to the innocency of the flowers of the field.”[260]
XLV.
COWHERD. 1763–1816.
IN any history of Vegetarianism it is impossible to omit record of the lives and labours of the institutors of a religious community who, in establishing humane dietetics as an essential condition of membership, may well claim the honourable title of religious reformers, and to whom belongs the singular merit of being the first and only founders of a Christian church who have inculcated a true religion of life as the basis of their teaching.
William Cowherd, the first founder of this new conception of the Christian religion, which assumed the name of the “Bible Christian Church,” was born at Carnforth, near Lonsdale, in 1763. His first appearance in public was as teacher of philology in a theological college at Beverley. Afterwards, coming to Manchester, he acted as curate to the Rev. J. Clowes, who, while remaining a member of the Established Church, had adopted the theological system of Swedenborg. Cowherd attached himself to the same mystic creed, and he is said to be one of the few students of him who have ever read through all the Latin writings of the Swedish theologian. He soon resigned his curacy, and for a short time he preached in the Swedenborgian temple in Peter Street. There he seems not to have found the freedom of opinion and breadth in teaching he had expected, and he determined to propagate his own convictions, independently of other authority. In the year 1800 he built, at his own expense, Christ Church, in King Street, Salford—the first meeting-place of the reformed church.[261] His extraordinary eloquence and ability, as well as earnestness of purpose, quickly attracted a large audience, and may well have brought to recollection the style and matter of the great orator of Constantinople of the fourth century. One characteristic of his Church—perhaps unique at that time—was the non-appropriation of sittings. Another unfashionable opinion held by him was the Pauline one of the obligation upon Christian preachers to maintain themselves by some “secular” labour, and he therefore kept a boarding school, which attained extensive proportions. In this college some zealous and able men, who afterwards were ordained by him to carry on a truly beneficent ministry, assisted in the work of teaching, of whom the names of Metcalfe, Clark, and Schofield are particularly noteworthy. Following out the principles of their Master, two of them took degrees in medicine, and gained their living by that profession. The Principal himself built an institute, connected with his church in Hulme, where, more recently, the late Mr. James Gaskill presided, who, at his death, left an endowment for its perpetuation as an educational establishment.
It was in the year 1809 that Cowherd formally promulgated, as cardinal doctrines of his system, the principle of abstinence from flesh-eating, which, in the first instance, he seems to have derived from “the medical arguments of Dr. Cheyne and the humanitarian sentiments of St. Pierre.” He died not many years after this formal declaration of faith and practice, not without the satisfaction of knowing that able and earnest disciples would carry on the great work of renovating the religious sentiment for the humanisation of the world.
Of those followers not the least eminent was Joseph Brotherton, the first M.P. for Salford, than which borough none has been more truly honoured by the choice of its legislative representative. A printing press had been set up at the Institution, and, after the death of the Master, his Facts Authentic in Science and Religion towards a New Foundation of the Bible, under which title he had collected the most various matter illustrative of passages in the Bible, and in defence of his own interpretation of them, was there printed. It is, as his biographer has well described it, “a lasting memorial of his wide reading and research—travellers, lawyers, poets, physicians, all are pressed into his service—the whole work forming a large quarto common-place book filled with reading as delightful as it is discursive. Some of his minor writings have also been printed. He was, besides his theological erudition, a practical chemist and astronomer, and he caused the dome of the church in King Street to be fitted up for the joint purposes of an observatory and a laboratory. His microscope is still preserved in the Peel Park Museum. His valuable library, which at one time was accessible to the public on easy terms, is now deposited in the new Bible Christian Church in Cross Lane. The books collected exhibit the strong mind which brought them together for its own uses. This library is the workshop in which he wrought out a new mode of life and a new theory of doctrine—with these instruments he moulded minds like that of Brotherton, and so his influence has worked in many unseen channels.” He died in 1816, and is buried in front of his chapel, in King Street, Salford.[262]