170
Testimony Studies on Diet and Foods
have encouraged the grosser part of your organization, while the more
refined has been weakened. You have repeatedly said in defense of
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your indulgence of meat-eating, “However injurious it may be to others,
it does not injure me, for I have used it all my life.” But you know not
how well you might have been if you had abstained from the use of
flesh-meats. As a family, you are far from being free from disease.
You have used the fat of animals which God in His word expressly
forbids: “It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout
all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood.” “Moreover, ye
shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any
of your dwellings. Whatsoever soul it be that eateth any manner of
blood, even that soul shall be cut off from his people.”
You have flesh, but it is not good material. You are worse off for
this amount of flesh. If you should each come down to a more spare
diet, which would take from you twenty-five or thirty pounds of your
gross flesh, you would be much less liable to disease. The eating of
flesh-meats has made a poor quality of blood and flesh. Your systems
are in a state of inflammation, prepared to take on disease. You are
liable to acute attacks of disease, and to sudden death, because you
do not possess the strength of constitution to rally and resist disease.
There will come a time when the strength and health you have flattered
yourself you possessed will prove to be weakness. It is not the chief
end of man to glorify his stomach. You have animal wants to be
supplied; but because of this necessity shall man become all animal?
You have set for your children a table of unwholesome food,
cooked in an unhealthful manner. You have placed flesh-meats before
them, and what is the result? Are they refined, intellectual, obedient,
conscientious, and religiously inclined? You know this is not the case,
but entirely contrary. Your manner of living has strengthened the ani-
mal of your nature and weakened the spiritual. You have transmitted
to your children a miserable legacy; a depraved nature rendered still
more depraved by your gross habits of eating and drinking. Your table
has completed the work of making them what they are. The sin lies
at your door. You know that they are not religiously inclined, that
they will not submit to restraint, but are inclined to disobedience, and
to disrespect your authority. Your eldest son especially is corrupt,
partaking to a great degree of the animal. Scarcely a trace of the divine
can be seen in his organization. You have brought up your children