clergy should be challenged to explain what right they have to go into
the pulpit, or take up their pens, and stamp as a crime an action
which many men whom we hold in affection and honor have committed;
and to refuse an honorable burial to those who relinquish this
world voluntarily. They have no Biblical authority to boast of,
as justifying their condemnation of suicide; nay, not even any
philosophical arguments that will hold water; and it must be
understood that it is arguments we want, and that we will not be put
off with mere phrases or words of abuse. If the criminal law forbids
suicide, that is not an argument valid in the Church; and besides, the
prohibition is ridiculous; for what penalty can frighten a man who is
not afraid of death itself? If the law punishes people for trying
to commit suicide, it is punishing the want of skill that makes the
attempt a failure.

The ancients, moreover, were very far from regarding the matter in
that light. Pliny says: _Life is not so desirable a thing as to be
protracted at any cost. Whoever you are, you are sure to die, even
though your life has been full of abomination and crime. The chief
of all remedies for a troubled mind is the feeling that among the
blessings which Nature gives to man, there is none greater than an
opportune death; and the best of it is that every one can avail
himself of it.[1]_ And elsewhere the same writer declares: _Not even
to God are all things possible; for he could not compass his own
death, if he willed to die, and yet in all the miseries of our earthly
life, this is the best of his gifts to man.[2]_ Nay, in Massilia
and on the isle of Ceos, the man who could give valid reasons
for relinquishing his life, was handed the cup of hemlock by the
magistrate; and that, too, in public.[3] And in ancient times, how
many heroes and wise men died a voluntary death. Aristotle,[4] it is