The advantages of vegetarian diet

by Bramwell Booth

This article originally appeared in The Herald of the Golden Age many years ago, and is being reprinted now to bring to mind again the great importance attached by the writer to the vegetarian way of living.  His views were also shared by his illustrious father, General William Booth, the founder of the world-wide Salvation Army which has done, and continues to do, such noble work among the poor.

Unfortunately, as in the case of John Wesley, this aspect of their teaching has been largely lost in later developments, though not entirely, for recent experiments made in Salvation Army Homes, although not purely vegetarian in nature, have established the important fact that diet does affect the moral character, surely a most important contribution to modern knowledge in view of the present increases in juvenile delinquency.

Even at the time when this article was written The Salvation Army, chiefly due to the initiative of Mrs. Bramwell Booth, had established the fact that drunkenness and flesh-eating were related and that the quickest way to cure drunkenness was to put the “patient” on to a non-flesh diet:  another significant fact which, to our knowledge, has not been sufficiently appreciated by would-be temperance reformers.

We are indebted to Miss Catherine Bramwell Booth, the daughter of the writer, for slight alterations to the original text which are shown in square brackets.  It will be appreciated that some of the statements occurring, as for instance in paragraph 6, while being undoubtedly true at the time of writing, may no longer apply and that some of the views expressed on dietary need to be reconsidered in light of the fuller scientific knowledge of dietetics now available.—Editor | The London Vegetarian Society

THE ADVANTAGES OF VEGETARIAN DIET

I have been frequently asked to write something on this subject.  In fact, on one occasion, I received from no less than forty Local Officers of The Salvation Army a request that I would explain to them all I meant by what I had called, when speaking in one of the [Conferences], the Gospel of Porridge.  I do not think I shall be able to do all that, but I will try and briefly reply to one question, which I often hear: “Why do you recommend Vegetarianism?”

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