"SLAY AND EAT."
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—In reference to my previous letter on this subject, I have been asked, "Do I hold it unlawful to kill ?" Certainly not. We must kill or be killed. If ayeirn bids us cherish our little ones,. and if God is this dytirn, it may be said, perhaps, though I should not like to put it so, that it is be who bids us kill,—bids- us rob the cow of its calf and eat it, and use the milk which he• made to prepare for its little one, for our own little ones. But then, the same civciwn, the same God that makes us do this,. makes us bate to have to do it, and cry out against the cruelty of this necessity, as a necessity only to be groaned under, not to be acquiesced in, and a necessity that can find no place in the coming kingdom. What I protest against, and what I find the cause of Atheism, is the attempt to debit God with those neces- sities that war against the life. I do not believe that it is given, to man to see anything good, or divine, or intentional in the imposition of those-evils which it was the mission of Jesus to save us from. While we treat them as foes to be fought against they may do good, but the moment we look at them as beneficent ordinances appointed for our good, it seems to me that we are in danger of worshipping that incubus, that temporary evil arrangement from which St. Paul says that Jesus came to- save us.
To say that God is not pure benevolence seems to me not only dangerous, but utterly senseless. I can see no clear creative purpose manifest in Nature, except in the movement which makes living things make themselves. Life is harmony,. i.e., sympathetic co-operation ; the internecine and competitive relations of living things are due to this,—that the harmony that animates each living organism has not yet succeeded in doing what it is manifestly trying to do, harmonising them with. one another.—I am, Sir, &c., Langton Lodge, Blamlford, May 22nd. G. D. Snow.
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