Evelyn produces an imposing array of the “Old Fathers”:—
“In short, so very many, especially of the Christian profession, advocate it [the bloodless food] that some even of the ancient fathers themselves have thought that the permission of eating flesh to Noah and his sons was granted them no otherwise than repudiation of wives was to the Jews—namely—for the hardness of their hearts and to satisfy a murmuring generation.”[130]
He is “persuaded that more blood has been shed between Christians” through addiction to the sanguinary food than by any other cause:—
“Not that I impute it only to our eating blood; but I sometimes wonder how it happened that so strict, so solemn, and famous a sanction—not upon a ceremonial account, but (as some affirm) a moral and perpetual one, for which also there seem to be fairer proofs than for most other controversies agitated amongst Christians—should be so generally forgotten, and give place to so many other impertinent disputes and cavils about superstitious fopperies which frequently end in blood and cutting of throats.”[131]
IT is opportune here to refer to the sentiments of Evelyn’s contemporary and political and ecclesiastical opposite—the great Puritan poet and patriot—one of the very greatest names in all literature. Milton’s feeling, so far as he had occasion to express it, is quite in unison with the principles of dietetic reform, and in sympathy with aspirations after the more spiritual life.
In one of his earliest writings, on the eve of the production of one of the finest poems of its kind in the English language—the Ode to Christ’s Nativity, composed at the age of twenty-one—he thus writes in Latin verse to his friend Charles Deodati, recommending the purer diet at all events to those who aspired to the nobler creations of poetry:—
“Simply let those, like him of Samos, live:
Let herbs to them a bloodless banquet give.
In beechen goblets let their beverage shine,
Cool from the crystal spring their sober wine!