[59] A more accurate version of the original than that of the A. V. (1 Cor. viii., 8–13). We may here quote the conclusion of the argument of the Greek-Jew Apostle—“Wherefore, if [the kind of] meat is a cause of offence to my brother, I will eat no flesh while the world stands, that I may not be a cause of offence to my brother”—and press it, more particularly, upon the attention of English residents, and especially of Christian missionaries, amongst the sensitive and refined Hindus who form so overwhelming a proportion of the population of the British Empire. According to the evidence of the missionaries of the various Christian churches themselves, their habits of flesh-eating have not infrequently been found to prejudice all but the lowest caste of Hindus against the reception of other ideas of Christian and Western “civilisation.”
[60] Usque ad choleram ortygometras cruditando. In the present case it seems that the wanderers in the Arabian deserts were not so much clamorous for flesh as for some kind of sustenance, or rather for something more than the manna with which they were supplied; since the late Egyptian slaves are reported to have said, “We remember the fish that we did eat in Egypt freely—the cucumbers, the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic; but now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all besides this manna before our eyes.”
We may here take occasion to observe that the fact of the existence of sacrifice throughout their history necessarily involves the practice of flesh-eating—indeed, the two practices are, historically, clearly connected. What, however, we may fairly deduce from their simple and frugal living in the Egyptian slavery, lasting, as it did, through several centuries, during which period they must have been weaned from the gross living of their previous barbarous pastoral life, is this—that but for the sacrificial rites (and, perhaps, the necessities of the desert) the Jews would have, like other Eastern peoples, probably adopted this frugal living—of cucumbers, melons, onions, &c.—in their new homes. Such, at least, seems to be a legitimate inference from the highly-significant fact that, throughout their sacred scriptures, not flesh-meats but corn, and oil, and honey, and pomegranates, and figs, and other vegetable products (in which their land originally abounded), are their highest dietary ideal—e.g., “O that my people would have hearkened to me; for if Israel had walked in my ways.... He should have fed them with the finest wheat flour: and with honey out of the stony rock should I have satisfied thee.” (Ps. lxxxi., 17; cf. also Ps. civ., 14, 15.) It is equally significant of the latent and secret consciousness of the unspiritual nature of the products of the Slaughter-House, even in the Western world, that in the liturgies or “public services” of the Christian churches, wherever food is prayed for or whenever thanks are returned for it, there is (as it seems) a natural shrinking from mention of that which is obtained only by cruelty and bloodshed, and it is “the kindly fruits of the earth” which represent the legitimate dietary wants of the petitioners.
[61] “For they that are after the Flesh do mind the things of the Flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.... So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.... Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye, through the spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Rom. viii., 5, &c.) A more spiritual apprehension of ‘divine verities,’ if we may so say, than the apparently more equivocal utterance of the same great reformer elsewhere. Here it is well to observe, once for all that the whole significance of the utterances of St. Paul upon flesh-eating depends upon the bitter controversies between the older Jew and the newer Greek or Roman sections of the rising Church. It is, in fact, a question of the lawfulness of eating the flesh of the victims of the Pagan and Jewish sacrificial altars—not of the question of flesh-eating in the abstract at all. In fine, it is a question not of ethics, but of theological ritual. It is greatly to be lamented that the confused and obscure translation of the A. V. has for so many centuries hopelessly mystified the whole subject—as far, at least, as the mass of the community is concerned.
[62] See De Jejuniis Adversus Psychicos. (Quinti. Sept. Flor. Tertulliani Opera. Edited by Gersdorf, Tauchnitz.)
[63] In the Clementine Homilies, which had a great authority and reputation in the earlier times of Christianity, St. Peter is represented, in describing his way of living to Clement of Rome, as professing the strictest Vegetarianism. “I live,” he declares, “upon bread and olives only, with the addition, rarely, of kitchen herbs” (ἄρτῳ μόνῳ καὶ ἐλαίαις χρῶμαι καὶ σπανίως λαχάνοις xii. 6.) Clement of Alexandria (Pædagogus ii. 1) assures us that “Matthew the apostle lived upon seeds, and hard-shelled fruits, and other vegetables, without touching flesh;” while Hegesippus, the historian of the Church (as quoted by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 2, 3) asserts of St. James that “he never ate any animal food”—οὔδε εμψυχον ἔφαγε: an assertion repeated by St. Augustine (Ad. Faust, xxii. 3) who states that James, the brother of the Lord, “lived upon seeds and vegetables, never tasting flesh or wine” (Jacobus, frater Domini, seminibus et oleribus usus est, non carne nec vino). The connexion of the beginnings of Christianity with the sublime and simple tenets of the Essenes, whose communistic and abstinent principles were strikingly coincident with those of the earliest Christians, is at once one of the most interesting and one of the most obscure phenomena in its nascent history. The Essenes, “the sober thinkers,” as their assumed name implies, seem to have been to the more noisy and ostentatious Jewish sects, what the Pythagoreans were to the other Greek schools of philosophy—practical moralists rather than mere talkers and theorisers. They first appear in Jewish history in the first century B.C. Their communities were settled in the recesses of the Jordan valley, yet their members were sometimes found in the towns and villages. Like the Pythagoreans, they extorted respect even from the worldly and self-seeking religionists and politicians of the capital. See Josephus (Antiquities xiii. and xviii.), and Philo, who speak in the highest terms of admiration of the simplicity of their life and the purity of their morality. Dean Stanley (Lectures on the Jewish Church, vol. iii.) regards St. John the Baptist as Essenian in his substitution of “reformation of life” for “the sanguinary, costly gifts of the sacrificial slaughter-house.”
[64] It is a curious and remarkable inconsistency, we may here observe, that the modern ardent admirers of the Fathers and Saints of the Church, while professing unbounded respect for their doctrines, for the most part ignore the one of their practices at once the most ancient, the most highly reputed, and the most universal. Quod semper, quod ubique, &c., the favourite maxim of St. Augustine and the orthodox church, is, in this case, “more honoured in the breach than in the observance.” Partial and periodical Abstinence, it is scarcely necessary to add, however consecrated by later ecclesiasticism, is sufficiently remote from the daily frugal living of a St. James, a St. Anthony, or a St. Chrysostom.
[65] The full title of the treatise is—The Miscellaneous Collection of T. F. Clemens of Gnostic (or Speculative) Memoirs upon the true Philosophy.
[66] This celebrated term distinguished the superiority of knowledge (gnosis) of “the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name.” During the first three or four centuries the Gnostics formed an extremely numerous as well as influential section of the Church. They sub-divided themselves into more than fifty particular sects, of whom the followers of Marcion and the Manicheans are the most celebrated. Holding opinions regarding the Jewish sacred scriptures and their authority the opposite to those of the Ebionites or Jewish Christians, they agreed, at least a large proportion of them, with the latter on the question of kreophagy.
[67] History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, by K. O. Müller, continued by J. W. Donaldson, D.D., vol. iii., 58.