The Forbidden Way

( Originally Published 1922 )

I AM asked if, in my opinion, suicide is ever justifiable. The question is one for the individual conscience. Men and women are answering it with a dreadful yea, yea, every day, casting away life as they might reject a worn-out garment.

By social consent, founded on religious feeling, suicide is a crime against God. It is also held to be a crime against society. Persons attempting suicide and failing in the act are subject to the rigor of the law. No legal punishment is (of course) provided for those who succeed, but they do not escape in the next world—the churches take care of that: all theologians agree that the suicide is eternally reprobate and damned.

I dissent utterly from this inhuman teaching, while I can conceive of no circumstances that would make suicide justifiable for myself. For so dissenting I shall be told that I render myself liable to damnation. Is it not strange that a man should be damned for holding too favorable an opinion of God?

But it may not be so bad as that—we have only some men's word for it!

We are told that hardly a soul comes into the world but at some time or other thinks of voluntarily quitting it, and is only restrained by the fear of eternal punishment.

I would change this—I would make life here, present, hopeful and abundant, the restraining influence. I would pit Life against Death and turn my back on the kingdom of shadows.

I do not defend suicide, but I plead for the many upon whom fate imposes this bitter des-tiny.

For myself I believe that life at the very worst is too precious a gift to throw away. Steep me in shame and sorrow to the very lips, exile me from the charity of my kind, pile on my bare head all the abuses and humiliations which human nature is capable of inflicting or enduring—my cry shall still and ever be for life, more life !

Though the wife of my youth should betray me again and again, though my children prove false and dishonor my gray hairs, though my oldest, truest friends abandon me and I be-come a "fixed figure for the time of scorn to point his slow unmoving finger at",—still shall I cling to this boon of life—life—life!

For now I tell you, heart-burdened, weary and despairing ones, if only you will be patient a little longer and wait, life itself shall heal your every sorrow.

I give you this Gospel of Hope, this water of refreshing in the arid desert of your despair ---

Life is the Healer, Life the Consoler, Life the Reconciler!

In earlier years I used to hear the most eloquent sermons on the blessedness of death, which always left me cold and unpersuaded. To such gloomy homilies is perhaps due the aversion I now feel toward most preaching. No ! talk not to me of death, that ironic Phan-tom, that grisly Sophist by whose aid religion maintains the unworthiest part of its conquest. I hate and abominate from my deepest soul this plausive, solemn, unctuous, lying cant of darkness and the grave. He that preaches fears it as much as he that hears, and will move heaven and earth to escape the inevitable doom. Away with such mummery !

Death in the ripe course of nature is beautiful and seemly, but death by disease, or violence, or accident, is horrible, for no man should be cheated or cheat himself of his due share of life. And this which is now an empty axiom shall one day be the highest law of a better state of society than we yet dream of, wherein disease shall be unknown and death by violence, public, private, or judicial, a thing without precedent.

My cry is for life—more life !

Look, ye impatient ones—I, too, have been down, down, down in those abysmal depths where hope is a mockery and the mercy of God despaired of; I have tasted the bitterness of betrayal by those most sacredly pledged to keep faith with me; I have known the utter-most treason of the heart; I have been made to feel that there was not one soul in all the living world joined to me by any true or lasting bond; I have seen the destruction of my own house of life, that temple of the soul, losing which a man is homeless on the earth.

And yet I rose out of this lowest hell of desolation, borne as I must believe by some late- succoring, strong-winged Angel of Hope—and blessed God to see again the cheerful face of life!

Little children, little children, the end of all will come only too soon: why hasten it? The Master of Life has bidden you wait His summons. By my soul ! I do not believe that He would harshly reprove you or turn away His face should you, under the goad of sorrows too great for endurance, come suddenly, unbidden, before Him. Yet were it better to stand firm like good soldiers and abide your call.

In other words, you are not to accept defeat. It is not that I would brand as coward the man who boldly pushes his way into the Unknown—the courage of that act is so appalling that men have named it madness. But it is a higher courage to resist the fates.

Yet—whisper !—I do not find it hard to believe that often God in His mercy shows this only way, this via dolorosa, to some poor lost soul, some victim of man's inhumanity, unable to struggle longer in the coils of fate.