an aversion to feeding on their flesh! Had God intended us so to live, he would not have imparted the milk of kindness to our bosoms. He always adapts his means to his ends:—He would rather have filled us with unfeeling ferocity—given us hearts incapable of humanity, of sympathy or mercy, and armed us, as he has done the hyena or the tiger, with fangs and claws, to lacerate and tear, without remorse or compunction, the palpitating limbs of agonizing life.
"Ah! then refrain the blood of beasts to spill,
And, till you can create forbear to kill!
Unthinking man! renounce that horrid knife
Nor dare to take for food a creature's life."
But we rest not here alone. We pass on to the consideration of other facts, recorded in the history of this remarkable People;—facts, which in our apprehension evince in the most unequivocal manner, that it has been the will of the Author of our nature at all times that his creatures should derive their subsistence from the productions of the vegetable kingdom; and that they should not imbrue their hands in the blood of innocent creatures for food. It is recorded in the Bible that while this people were sojourning in the Wilderness, they were daily fed, by the bounty of their Heavenly Father with Manna, and that this display of his providential and paternal care was exercised over them, for forty years in succession; nor did the Manna cease to fall till the people began to eat of the fruits of the Promised Land. It will not be denied that the same Omnipotence, exercised in the continuous production of the Manna, had it pleased the Divine Being so to employ his power, could have furnished, with equal facility, flesh for his people in the Wilderness. But it was obviously the will of the Great Furnisher that his people should be sustained by bread. "Behold," says he, "I will rain bread from Heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them,
