He could scarcely conceive a future existence framed upon those lines of struggle, which in its working involves pain and cruelty and death.

Putting aside sport and its pleasures, which he had abandoned because of the suffering and extinction entailed upon the shot or hunted creatures, to him it seemed inexpressibly sad that even his honest farming operations, at least where the beasts were concerned, should always culminate in death.

Why should the faithful horse be knocked on the head when it grew old, or the poor cow go to the butcher as a reward for its long career of usefulness and profit?
What relentless power had thus decreed?
In any higher life surely this decree would be rescinded, and of that side of Nature he had seen more than enough upon the earth.

It was her gentler and harmless aspects from which he did not wish to part--from the flower and the fruit, from the springing blade and the ripened corn; from the beauty that brooded over sea and land; from the glory of the spreading firmament alive with light, and the winds that blew beneath it, and the rains that washed the face of earth; from the majestic passage of the glittering stars shedding their sweet influences through the night.

To bid farewell to such things as these must, to his mind, indeed be terrible.
Once he said as much to Barbara, who thought a while and answered him: "Why should we be taken beyond all things?
If seems scarcely reasonable.
I know we have not much to go on, but did not the Christ speak of drinking the fruit of the vine 'new with you in my Father's kingdom'?
Therefore surely there must be a growing plant that produces the fruit and a process directed by intelligence that turns it into wine.