nations of the east. But what still more surprised me, and is the least pardonable part of the whole, was the ignorance of part of the law of God, the earliest that was given to man, the most frequently noted, insisted upon, and prohibited. I have said, in the course of the narrative of my journey from Masuah, that, at a small distance from Axum, I overtook on the way three travellers, who seemed to be soldiers, driving a cow before them. They halted at a brook, threw down the beast, and one of them cut a pretty large collop of flesh from its buttocks, after which they drove the cow gently on as before. A violent outcry was raised in England at hearing this circumstance, which many did not hesitate to pronounce impossible, when the manners and customs of Abyssinia were to them utterly unknown. The Jesuits, established in Abyssinia for above a hundred years, had told them of that people eating what they call raw meat, in every page, and yet they were ignorant of this. Poncet, too, had done the same, but Poncet they had not read; and, if any writer upon Ethiopia had omitted to mention it, it was because it was one of those facts too notorious to be repeated to swell a volume. It must be from prejudice alone we condemn the eating of raw flesh; no precept, divine or human, that 1 know, forbids it; and, if it is true, as later travellers have discovered, that there are nations ignorant of the use of fire, any law against eating raw flesh could never have been intended by God as obligatory upon mankind in general. At any rate, it is certainly not clearly known, whether the eating raw flesh was not an earlier and more general practice than by preparing it with fire; I think it was. Many wise and learned men have doubted whether it was at first permitted to man to eat animal food at all. I do not pretend to give any opinion upon the subject, but many topics have been maintained successfully upon much more slender grounds. God, the author of life, and the best judge of what was proper to maintain it, gave this regimen to our first parents, -"Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed': to you it shall be for meat.*” And though, immediately after, he mentions both beasts and fowls, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth, he does not say that he designed any of these as meat for man. On the contrary, he seems to have intended the vegetable creation as food for both man and beast; "And to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat and it was so." After the flood, when mankind began to repossess the earth, God gave Noah a much more extensive permission: 66 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." As the criterion of judging of their aptitude for food was declared to be their moving and having life, a danger appeared of misinterpretation, and that these creatures should be used living; a thing which God by no means intended, and therefore, immediately after, it is said, " But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall you not eat §;" or, as it is rendered by the best interpreters, Flesh, or members, torn from living animals having the blood in *Gen. chap. i. ver. 29. them, thou shall not eat.' We see then, by this prohibition, that this abuse of eating living meat, or part of animals while yet alive, was known in the days of Noah, and forbidden after being so known, and it is precisely what is practised in Abyssinia to this day. This law, then, was prior to that of Moses, but it came from the same legislator. It was given to Noah, and consequently obligatory upon the whole world. Moses, however, insists upon it throughout his whole law; which not only shews that this abuse was common, but that it was deeply rooted in, and interwoven with, the manners of the Hebrews. He positively prohibits it four times in one chapter in Deuteronomy and thrice in one of the chapters of Leviticus t"Thou shalt not eat the blood, for the blood is the life; thou shalt pour it upon the earth like water." * Although the many instances of God's tenderness to the brute creation, that constantly occur in the Mosaical precepts, and are a very beautiful part of them, and though the barbarity of the custom itself might reasonably lead us to think that humanity alone was a sufficient motive for the prohibition of eating animals alive, 'yet nothing can be more certain, than that greater consequences were annexed to the indulging in this crime than what was apprehended from a mere depravity of manners. One of the most learned and sensible men that ever wrote upon the sacred scriptures, observes, that God, in forbidding this practice, uses more severe certification, and more threatening language, than against any other sin, excepting Deut. chap. xii. + Levit. chap. xvii. Maimon, more Nebochim. idolatry, with which it is constantly joined. God declares, “I will set my face against him that eateth blood, in the same manner as I will against him that sacrificeth his son to Moloch; I will set my face against him that eateth flesh with blood, till I cut him off from the people." We have an instance in the life of Saul * that shews the propensity of the Israelites to this crime. Saul's army, after a battle, flew, that is, fell voraciously upon the cattle they had taken, and threw them upon the ground to cut off their flesh, and eat them raw, so that the army was defiled by eating blood, or living animals. To prevent this, Saul caused roll to him a great stone, and ordered those that killed their oxen to cut their throats upon that stone. This was the only lawful way of killing animals for food; the tying of the ox and throwing it upon the ground was not permitted as equivalent. The Israelites did probably in that case as the Abyssinians do at this day; they cut a part of its throat, so that blood might be seen upon the ground, but nothing mortal to the animal followed from that wound. But, after laying his head upon a large stone, and cutting his throat, the blood fell from on high, or was poured on the ground like water, and sufficient evidence appeared that the creature was dead before it was attempted to eat it. We have seen that the Abyssinians came from Palestine a very few years after this; and we are not to doubt that they then carried with them this, with many other Jewish customs, which they have continued to this day. The author I last quoted says, that it is plain, from all the books of the eastern nations, that their motive 1 Sam. chap. xiv, ver. 32. 33. for eating flesh with the life, or limbs of living animals cut off with the blood, was that of religion, and for the purposes of idolatry, and so it probably had been among the Jews; for one of the reasons given in Leviticus for the prohibition of eating blood, or living flesh, is, that the people may no longer offer sacrifices to devils, after whom they have gone a-whoring *. If the reader chooses to be further informed how very common this practice was, he need only read the Halacoth Gedaloth, or its translation, where the whole chapter is taken up with instances of this kind. That this practice likewise prevailed in Europe, as well as in Asia and Africa, may be collected from various authors. The Greeks had their bloody feasts and sacrifices where they ate living flesh; these were called Omophagia. Arnobius t says, "Let us pass over the horrid scenes presented at the Bacchanalian feast, wherein, with a counterfeited fury, though with a truly depraved heart, you twine a number of serpents around you, and, pretending to be possessed with some god, or spirit, you tear to pieces, with bloody mouths, the bowels of living goats, which cry all the time from the torture they suffer." From all this it appears, that the practice of the Abyssinians eating live animals at this day, was very far from being new, or, what was nonsensically said, impossible. And I shall only further observe, that those of my readers that wish to indulge a spirit of criticism upon the great variety of customs, men and manners, related in this history, or * Levit. chap. xvii. ver. 7. + Arnob. adv. Gent. Clem. Alexan. Sextus Empiricus, lib. iii. cap. 25. and Selden. de Jur. natur. and Gent. cap. 1. lib. vii. VOL. IV. 2 H |