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the Courts of Heaven; there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the individual determines to which source chiefly it shall be opened, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality."

Thoreau, like many another great soul, was at heart an Anarchist. He writes:

"One afternoon near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobblers, I was seized and put into jail, because I did not pay a tax to, or recognise the authority of, the state which buys and sells men and women and children like cattle, at the door of the senate house.

"I had gone down the woods for other purposes. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society."

This pursuing of the individual with dirty institutions still characterises society. And if a man have noble aims, and a high spirit inducing him to endeavour to attain to noble ends, that man is precisely the one whom society views with most distrust and most hatred. Let such a man only come within the letter of the law, and the little minded men of office will see to it that he is befouled to whatever degree an institution can befoul a noble soul. This is the history of all progress. The individual sees a truth and acts upon it, and society, detesting all non-conformity, first persecutes the individual, and then places him in the calendar of the saints.

FREDERICK ROCKELL.

THE ETHICS OF SUICIDE.

"Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no,
No question was asked me it could not be so:
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try,
And to live on be Yes, what can No be?-To die.'

"Is 't returned as 'twas sent? Is 't no worse for the wear?
Think first what you are: call to mind what you were.

I gave you innocence, I gave you hope,

Gave health and genius and an ample scope:

Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?

Make out the invent'ry, inspect, compare:
Then die-if die you dare!'

Coleridge.

"Why should those who are happy expect one who is miserable to die before them in a graceful attitude like the gladiator before the Roman mob? "—Göthe.

I.

WE We propose in this essay to offer some reflections upon the conditional innocence and utility of a practice that, for centuries past, has unfortunately been stigmatised as grossly and unconditionally criminal; to traverse entirely the orthodox teaching thereupon; and to point out how baneful and demoralising in this, as in so many other spheres of ethics, has been the influence of that Church which, by her unqualified insistence on submission and resignation, and by her slavish and superstitious denunciations of “rebellion against the decrees of God," has sought-and only too successfully -to cut off the one avenue of escape that lay ever open to suffering humanity, and has thereby increased twenty-fold the power of tyrants to wreak upon their helpless victims their devilish lust of torture: for in this respect and not in this alone-Christianity has well earned the taunt that it is "a religion for slaves but not for men." How different were the attitudes of the stalwart defiant Stoic or Epicurean of old, and of the submissive soul-fettered Christian who followed him: the one, able to defy the worst adversity, and laugh to scorn the cruellest and most mighty tyrant— because voluntary death remained ever open to him as a dernier resort against the worst fate: and the other, pale and trembling, heartbroken at the sufferings and agonies which tyrant-fate and tyrant-man might heap upon him and his dear ones.

( 192 )

“There is one thing that no man can take from me: no man can deprive me of death"-how clearly that proud and manly Stoic utterance rings in the memory! Alas! that so healthy and invigorating a spirit should have been crushed out by modern slave-doctrines, leaving men to be the waifs and shuttlecocks of Life and Time, chained oftentimes to misery and madness, and yet daring not to, or even worse-not realising in their spiritdeadness their ability to, quit this tyrant Farce of Existence ! Let us hope that the world has passed through its worst throes now, and that a saner age will at length do justice, though tardily, to the manly wisdom of the Stoics, and will recognise the real utility and conditional innocence of suicide as the great anesthetic for incurable sufferings. Meanwhile, for reformers, there are probably few departments of philanthropic activity wherein earnesthearted men and women might more profitably employ themselves than in preaching to the outcast, the hopeless, the incurably-diseased, and the stricken failures in this life-struggle, the innocence, the desirability, nay, even perhaps the social duty, of suicide; and in vigorously fighting to obtain for these afflicted ones the inestimable boon of a conscience-free, socially-applauded, deliberate suicide. By those who have grown to look upon suicide philosophically as did the Stoics, and to keep it before their mind's eye as a permanently possible escape from destitution, incurable bodily anguish, or heart-broken bereavement-who regard it, in fact, as in exactly the same category with insurance against fire or burglary -there is enjoyed a grand restfulness and repose of mind unknown to other men: their's is a lessening of anxiety, and a serene or defiant recklessness of Fate, irrevocably denied to the orthodox, for whom no such escape lies open and an immense load, not only of actual present pain and sorrow, but also of far-foreseeing anxiety, would be lifted from the world's shoulders, did only men realise that they could themselves sign their release at any moment —that the entry lay ever open for them to the last refuge for the weary and oppressed.

True, this may seem to many but a cold comfort and a bitter consolation; a panacea for ills, that will dry man's tears-but only by closing his eyes; that will wrap him warmly-but with a shroud; that will give him peace-but only by stilling for ever

N

the possibility of woe and weal alike; that will arm him with the resolution of despair; and that interweaves with every movement of Life's chorus the prophetic beat of the funeral chant; but that chant harmonises the clashing chords of our pathetic Life-music; and that resolution, which steadily contemplates suicide as an ever possible last resort, finds life tolerable, banishes the paralysing fear from Love, mocks the threats of fickle fortune, abolishes slavery and drudgery and grinding poverty, and laughs to scorn the monsters of disease and suffering.

Curious indeed were it to inquire how so precious a weapon against Fate came to be tossed aside; and why an act, held in honour by antiquity, and not branded as sinful, not indeed even mentioned, by the canons of the new creed, has yet come to be esteemed a desperate crime by that same creed's adherents.*

This consideration leads us to suggest that the reconciliation of suicide with the Christian ethical code would require far less exegetical ingenuity than other reconciliations that the interpreters of orthodoxy have periodical occasion to perpetrate: and, if the doctors of the Church would only effect this reconciliation, and authoritatively promulgate the doctrine that suicide is not "unscriptural," we would willingly forgo all our gibes, and hail them as benefactors to their race: for, so long as a large proportion of our race remain, at least nominally, Christian, it must be of supreme concern to the philanthropist to have this privilege of suicide put within their power; and, for the sake of winning this priceless boon to thousands of our struggling sorrowing fellows, we would gladly forgo any party-advantage derivable from the volte-face of the Church. It seems to us that such a reconciliation should cause but little straining to a Church that has swallowed modern geology, evolutionism, and Copernican astronomyif only a sufficient motive-power of desire for such admission of suicide could be found ; and that, we admit, is the difficulty: for the rest, the exegetes would have plain sailing; since to reconcile

* So sinful indeed that, although novelists and dramatists not infrequently paint their heroines as prepared to instantly kill themselves rather than suffer dishonour (for which manliness we heartily applaud such writers; and gratefully acknowledge the service that they have done by thus far educating popular sentiment) yet we doubt if even now a professional Christian would tolerate for a moment any such proposition: he would probably insist that a hapless girl suffer unspeakable outrage at the hands of ruffians rather than escape agony and dishonour by death; and, should she yet elect the latter alternative, he would be very emphatic as to her reprobation hereafter; and this attitude as we shall see anon, is that of the honoured fathers of the accursed Church.

suicide with a creed that says absolutely nothing against it must be very easy for men who have "reconciled" modern science with the hopeless errors and childish blunders of the "inspired" volume.

And here it is that an outsider, recognising the ethical innocence, and the oftentimes great hedonistic gain, of suicide, and noting too that suicide is nowhere prohibited in the Christian Scriptures, is apt to be so much puzzled: how comes it-he may well ask-that it is yet denounced as a crime by a Church that professes to derive its ethics from the Bible. And we must at once admit that, even after making full allowance for the carelessness, the prejudices, and the parrot-nature, of most Christians, it is yet passing strange that they should have so implicitly adopted the notion that suicide is a breach of Divine Law. "Oh that the Almighty had not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter," strikes few people as involving any unscriptural assertion; but yet it is clear that no canon 'gainst self-slaughter can be found in the Christians' Bible. In the New Testament there occur very few allusions indeed, of any sort, to suicide; whilst in the Old Testament, where cases of suicide are frequently related, the context is such that we may very fairly infer such suicide to be, at the very least, not reprobated. Why then do Christians assert suicide to be divinely forbidden? Will it be replied-conveniently waiving the implications of the Old Testament—that suicide is expressly forbidden, since it is only one species of murder-self-murder to wit? This position cannot be sustained for a moment; and the vulgar practice of designating suicide as self-murder only instances once more the vicious tyranny of words over our ideas—a tyranny mainly supported by the unanalytical carelessness of mankind. Self-murder is a ridiculous and meaningless term, a cowardly and insincere epithet, invented for the purpose of begging the whole argument at starting, and confounding together-as popular terms characteristically do-two wholly distinct and different acts. That murder is a crime we are all agreed: but why-what does that same word murder connote? To murder is to wilfully deprive another of his life-otherwise than in self-defence, or as a punishment for grievous crime: and such a deed is criminal because (on any system of utilitarianism, direct

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