the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and
philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven
through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines.
There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is
different from other crimes--for it makes even crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he
said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of
this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite
of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside
him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares
so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of
everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to
end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he
renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this
ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that
something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link
with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the
universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the
queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the
suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of
carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic.
The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.
They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave
afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very
poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the cross-roads to show
what Christianity thought of the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity