sprung from sexual intercourse,183 may be killed with impunity.  We are told they cannot.  So it is not on account of their relation to certain princes that you forbid your followers to kill animals.  Or if you make a general relationship to all bodies, the princes would be equally concerned about trees, which you do not require your followers to spare.  You are brought back to the weak reply, that the injuries done in the case of plants are atoned for by the fruits which your followers bring to your church.  For this implies that those who slaughter animals, and sell their flesh in the market, if they are your followers, and if they bring to you vegetables 86 bought with their gains, may think nothing of the daily slaughter, and are cleared of any sin that may be in it by your repasts. 62.  But if you say that, in order to expiate the slaughter, the thing must be given as food, as in the case of fruits and vegetables,—which cannot be done, because the elect do not eat flesh, and so your followers must not slaughter animals,—what reply will you give in the case of thorns and weeds, which farmers destroy in clearing their fields, while they cannot bring any food to you from them?  How can there be pardon for such destruction, which gives no nourishment to the saints?  Perhaps you also put away any sin committed, for the benefit of the fruits and vegetables, by eating some of these.  What then if the fields are plundered by locusts, mice, or rats, as we see often happen?  Can your rustic follower kill these with impunity, because he sins for the good of his crops?  Here you are at a loss; for you either allow your followers to kill animals, which your founder prohibited, or you forbid them to be cultivators, which he made lawful.  Indeed, you sometimes go so far as to say that an usurer is more harmless than a cultivator,—you feel so much more for melons than for men.  Rather than hurt the melons, you would have a man ruined as a debtor.  Is this desirable and praiseworthy justice, or not rather atrocious and damnable error?  Is this commendable compassion, or not rather detestable barbarity? 63.  What, again, of your not abstaining yourselves from the slaughter of lice, bugs, and fleas?  You think it a sufficient excuse for this to say that these are the dirt of our bodies.  But this is clearly untrue of fleas and bugs; for every one knows that these animals do not come from our bodies.  Besides, if you abhor sexual intercourse as much as you pretend to do, you should think those animals all the cleaner which come from our bodies without any other generation; for although they produce offspring of their own, they are not produced in ordinary generation from us.  Again, if we must consider as most filthy the production of living bodies, still worse must be the production of dead bodies.  There must be less harm, therefore, in killing a rat, a snake, or a scorpion, which you constantly say come from our dead bodies.  But to pass over what is less plain and certain, it is a common opinion regarding bees that they come from the carcases of oxen; so there is no harm in killing them.  Or if 183 [This is, of course, a physiological blunder, but Augustin doubtless states what was the common view at the time.—A.H.N.] 148 Description of the Symbol of the Hands Among the Manichæans.