OCR Text |
Show THE GROWTH OF SUICIDE. It cannot be denied that the habit of suicide has grown in our society very rapidly of late years, and it is in great part explained by the diminution of religious antipathy to it. It is the religious objections to self-murder that have chiefly controlled it in the past, and they alone are believed to be capable of controlling it in the future. Advice does no good. As a recent writer in Blackwood observes, "all the piles of books which have been written about suicide, all the moral, philosophical, legal, medical, statistical, and devotional treating which have been composed in all languages, with respect to it, have failed to exercise the faintest effect upon it; even laws of barbarous severity have ?[been] ?[unreadable] to stop it." And the explanation furnished is, "because it is one of the forms of the pursuit of happiness; because it is an outburst of the universal appetite for calm; because every man who willfully terminates his life does so, necessarily, with the idea of improving his condition. This is unquestionably at the bottom of it. There is really no other satisfactory explanation of suicide. The world has never invented a more active fashion for a man to better his condition, and unless he is a religious man he is liable to be powerfully reached, at some period of his life or another, by its influences. In the days of the roman Empire suicide was so universally reckoned meritorious and honorable that it was found necessary to resort to ?[unusual] methods to stamp it out. Nothing but positive and direct religious convictions have proved equal to its arrest. It is a clear revolt against divine law; a meeting against the arrangements and means of Divine Providence. We escape from nothing by it, and we only make matters as much worse as possible.-Mass. [Massachusetts] Ploughman. |