p. 11 | Are You a Cannibal?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 28, 1870

Are You a Cannibal?

If I were to take you to my house, and say I had an exquisitely fat man, and wished you to join me in eating him, your indignation could be restrained by nothing. You would pronounce me to be crazy. There is not in New York a man so mean that he would not put down a man who should propose to have a banquet off from a fellow-man, cutting steaks out of him, and eating them. And that is nothing but feasting on the human body; while they all will sit down, and take a man's soul, and look for the tender-loins, and invite their neighbors in to partake of these titbits. They will take a man's honor and name, and broil them over the coals of their indignation, and fill the whole room with the aroma thereof, and give their neighbor a piece, and watch him, and wink as he tastes it. You all eat men up, and you are cannibals every one of you—and worse. You will be glad to get off at God's judgment-seat with the plea, “I only ate the outside.” You ate the souls, the finest elements of men. You are more than glad if you can whisper a word that is derogatory to a neighbor, his wife, or his daughter. You have a secret, but you do not make yourself responsible for it. And yet by an oblique sentence, you leave unfavorable impressions on the mind of the person addressed, in respect to the subject of your criticism. “Ah!” he says, “I had not been informed?” and he goes to the next neighbor, and says: “Mr. So-and-so says this and that about So-and-so.” And that neighbor says, “Indeed,” and runs to his partner, and they both run to their wives; and the thing goes all over town. Everybody becomes an unpaid devil's mail-carrier, and goes here and there bearing infernal messages. And what is the result? It is damnation to some poor creature who is unconscious, or that is innocent, or that, if guilty, ought to be pitied and succored, rather than condemned. But, ah! the morsel is too exquisite to be lost. Here is the soul of a person, here is a person's hope for this world and the world to come, and you have it on your fork, and you cannot refrain from tasting it, and giving it to some one else to taste. You are cannibals, eating men's honor and name, and rejoicing in it—and that too, when you did not always know that the things charged against them were true; when in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the probabilities were that they were not true—From a Sermon by H. W. Beecher.