"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself, yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world."
We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
ancestral Calvinism,--him who made the garden and the serpent, and
pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found
humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the
sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now,
to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer
so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to
worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'
Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
to his question about the worth of life. There are in most men
instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certainty
that you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The
thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.
"This little life is all we must endure;
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"--
says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
Meanwhile we can always {47} stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
postman will bring.
But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something
that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The
sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are
what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
country in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history of
our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
reading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1483 a papal
bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination. It absolved those
who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
pains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimized
their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.
"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt
alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres,
had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
Penile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having
praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches
which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the
fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then
lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which,
being lighted, blew his head to pieces;... Sara Rostignol was slit
open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road
between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried
thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre."[2]
_Und dergleicken mehr_! In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the
Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The
places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and {49} the
whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services.
More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the
normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In
1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give
up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French
and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained
alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to
Switzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by
one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of
them returned to conquer their old homes again. They fought their way
to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met
every force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving
up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV.,
restored them to comparative freedom,--since which time they have
increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.
What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the
recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us
with resolution against our petty powers of darkness,--machine
politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worth living, no matter
what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful
terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat. To the
suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral
nature, you can appeal--and appeal in the name of the very evils that
make his heart sick there--to wait and see his part of the battle out.
And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50}
circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
licking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation
based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves
an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
evil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand of
yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
large is _none of your business_ until your business with your private
particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this
sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
relation to the universe in a more solemn light. "Does not," as a
young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one
possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.
{51}
Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
religion and its more positive gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of
you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.