equalled by its stupidity.  For suppose a place where food cannot be purchased:  the beggar will die of starvation, while you, in your wisdom and benevolence, have more mercy on a cucumber than on a human being!  This is in truth (for how could it be better designated) pretended compassion, and real cruelty.  Then observe the stupidity.  What if the beggar buys bread for himself with the money you give him?  Will the divine part, as you call it, not suffer the same in him when he buys the food as it would have suffered if he had taken it as a gift from you?  So this sinful beggar plunges in corruption part of God eager to escape, and is aided in this crime by your money!  But you in your great sagacity think it enough that you do not give to one about to commit murder a man to kill, though you knowingly give him money to procure somebody to be killed.  Can any madness go beyond this?  The result is, that either the man dies if he cannot get food for his money, or the food itself dies if he gets it.  The one is true murder; the other what you call murder:  though in both cases you incur the guilt of real murder.  Again, there is the greatest folly and absurdity in allowing your followers to eat animal food, while you forbid them to kill animals.  If this food does not defile, take it yourselves.  If it defiles, what can be more unreasonable than to think it more sinful to separate the soul of a pig from its body than to defile the soul of a man with the pig’s flesh. 144 Disclosure of the Monstrous Tenets of the Manichæans.