It is now nearly thirty years since I ate fish, flesh, or fowl, or took fermented liquor of any kind whatsoever. I find, from continued experience, that abstinence is the best medicine. I don't meddle with fermented liquors of any kind, even as medicine. I find I am capable of doing better without them than when I was in the daily use of them.
"One way in which I was favored to experience help in my willingness to abandon all these things, arose from the effect my abstinence had on my natural temper. My natural disposition is very irritable. I am persuaded that ardent spirits and high living have more or less effect in tending to raise into action those evil propensities which, if given way to, war against the soul, and render us displeasing to Almighty God."
ALEXANDER POPE.
Pope, the poet, ascribes all the bad passions and diseases of the human race to their subsisting on the flesh, blood, and miseries of animals. "Nothing," he says, "can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens, sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of creatures expiring, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one an image of a giant's den in romance, bestrewed with the scattered heads and mangled limbs of those who were slain by his cruelty."
SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS.
Sir Richard Phillips, in his "Million of Facts," says that "the mixed and fanciful diet of man is considered as the cause of numerous diseases, from which animals are exempt. Many diseases have abated with changes of natural diet, and others are virulent in particular countries, arising from peculiarities. The Hindoos are considered the freest from disease of any part of the human race. The laborers on the African coast, who go from tribe to tribe to perform the manual labor, and whose strength is wonderful, live entirely on plain rice. The Irish, Swiss, and Gascons, the slaves of Europe, feed also on the simplest diet; the former chiefly on potatoes."
He states, also, that the diseases of cattle often afflict those who subsist on them. "In 1599," he observes, "the Venetian government, to stop a fatal disease among the people, prohibited the sale of meat, butter, or cheese, on Pain of death."
SIR ISAAC NEWTON.
This distinguished philosopher and mathematician is said to have abstained rigorously, at times, from all but purely vegetable food, and from all drinks but water; and it is also stated that some of his important labors were performed at these seasons of strict temperance. While writing his treatise on Optics, it is said he confined himself entirely to bread, with a little sack and water; and I have no doubt that his remarkable equanimity of temper, and that government of his animal appetites, throughout, for which he was so distinguished to the last hour of his life, were owing, in no small degree, to his habits of rigid temperance.