THE ORIGINAL FOOD OF MAN.
WHAT liberal provision God has made for man. What more could or ought we to ask? The luscious fruits from loaded trees and vines,—what variety, and how easily obtained. And what more appetizing than our garden and field berries? Any poor man's family can gather them from the pasture fields, and from the berry bushes that grow wild; or the plants may easily be propagated. And besides the fruits from our own fields, gardens, and orchards, we have the fruits from every clime, and all in unstinted measure. Then the vegetable kingdom! How could we wish greater variety or more nutritious fare? Well cooked, these are good enough for the greatest epicure. We have all these for the noon-day meal, and for breakfast and supper, the cereals with the nutritious meal from the golden American maize, and the delicious buckwheat, whose flowers tempt the industrious bee to store up for us the sweetest nectar for the cakes made from the grain. We sing of the love of our dear Heavenly Father, “O, it is wonderful! wonderful! very, very wonderful!” When we think of His provision for us (aside from the sacrifice of His precious Son) we are almost overwhelmed with “wonder, love, and praise.” To continue the enumeration of our blessings, there are our nut-bearing trees, the outer covering of which nature opens with the frost as perfectly as man could do it with any blade, allowing the nuts to drop into the lap, or at the feet, of childhood. We think the dear Father must have thought of the children when He planted the trees,—the hickory-nut, chestnut, butternut, beechnut, and the hazelnut,—often by the road-side, where the smallest child can fill his pockets going to and from school. How well we remember them! But alas! what thankless children are we all of larger growth. We eat to satiety, and like the animals under the trees, look not up to see whence come the blessings. The German must have his beer (fresh, for what cares he for the Sabbath) to wash down this heaven-sent repast, and on many tables must appear the “swine's flesh and broth of abominable things,” which are spoken of in Holy Writ in no mistakable terms. As for ourselves, the forbidden flesh comes on the table and goes off untouched. If it was not fit for God's children in olden times, we can not think it is now, with its trichina and microbes. A meat diet seems to produce corpulence and an abnormal size, to create lethargy and flabbiness, to dull the perceptions, and to cause diseases from which we shrink with horror and dread. It is asserted that cancer is rarely known among the Jews. If this statement is true, it is a convincing argument against the use of pork. But it is sufficient for the Christian that God forbade the use of swine's flesh among His people of old, and condemned those who persisted in eating “swine's flesh and broth of abominable things.”