John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[520] He came to the conclusion that the use of fire in cooking was wicked, that there could be no purity, nothing heavenly in food that was cooked by fire Why? Fire belonged in the other place. Another of his notions, which several of his friends adopted with him, was that it was wrong to use sheeps' wool in making clothes, because nature gave the sheep its fleece for its protection and warmth, and if you shear off the fleece for your own purposes, you deprive this unresisting and helpless sheep of its natural clothing. Therefore you ought not to do it; it was a sin. If you would go around in the field among the brambles where the sheep wandered, and gather up there the parts of their fleece which had been caught off by the twigs and branches, there would be no sin in making clothes of that sort of wool. But to go into a shop and buy a piece of woollen cloth and have it made into a coat would be sinful. As for cotton clothes, they could not be worn because there was slavery in every fibre. The cotton was cultivated by slaves and gathered by slaves, and the man who put on any American cotton was compromising with slavery, and making himself a party to slavery, when he ought to repudiate slavery, spurn the devil and all his works. So they couldn't rightfully wear either woollen or cotton clothes, and had to take refuge in linen. I recollect I was driving along one day in the winter when I came upon two of these gentlemen dressed in linen garments. They had on overcoats, but they were of linen. They looked cold, and owned it, and said they were glad when I asked them to drive home with me. When dinner came they were perfectly willing to take seats with us at the table, but they wished us to understand beforehand that they had brought their own food with them, and that they could not take part in any banquet that had been prepared by fire. They had a bag of apples and a bag of uncracked wheat; and out of that, with a drink of plain water, they made their dinner.

Well, the whole country was full of just such ideas, such arguments, and some of them were sensible and some were not. There was another movement of real and profound importance that was going on at that time, especially in Boston, and that