But although the suppression of the gladiatorial shows was not effected in the metropolis of the Empire till nearly ninety years after Christianity had been the State religion, the distinction between the teaching of the Christians and Pagans on the subject remained unimpaired. To the last, [pg 037] the most estimable of the Pagans appear to have regarded them with favour or indifference. Julian, it is true, with a rare magnanimity, refused persistently, in his conflict with Christianity, to avail himself, as he might most easily have done, of the popular passion for games which the Church condemned; but Libanius has noticed them with some approbation,61 and Symmachus, as we have already seen, both instituted and applauded them. But the Christians steadily refused to admit any professional gladiator to baptism till he had pledged himself to abandon his calling, and every Christian who attended the games was excluded from communion. The preachers and writers of the Church denounced them with the most unqualified vehemence, and the poet Prudentius made a direct and earnest appeal to the emperor to suppress them. In the East, where they had never taken very firm root, they appear to have ceased about the time of Theodosius, and a passion for chariot races, which rose to the most extravagant height at Constantinople and in many other cities, took their place. In the West, the last gladiatorial show was celebrated at Rome, under Honorius, in a.d. 404, in honour of the triumph of Stilicho, when an Asiatic monk, named Telemachus, animated by the noblest heroism of philanthropy, rushed into the amphitheatre, and attempted to part the combatants. He perished beneath a shower of stones flung by the angry spectators; but his death led to the final abolition of the games.62 Combats of men with wild beasts continued, however, much later, and were especially popular in the East. The difficulty of procuring wild animals, amid the general poverty, contributed, with other causes, to their decline. They sank, at last, into games of cruelty to animals, but of little danger to men, and were finally condemned, at the end of the seventh century, by the Council of Trullo.63 In Italy, [pg 038] the custom of sham fights, which continued through the whole of the middle ages, and which Petrarch declares were in his days sometimes attended with considerable bloodshed, may perhaps be traced in some degree to the traditions of the amphitheatre.64

The extinction of the gladiatorial spectacles is, of all the results of early Christian influence, that upon which the historian can look with the deepest and most unmingled satisfaction. Horrible as was the bloodshed they directly caused, these games were perhaps still more pernicious on account of the callousness of feeling they diffused through all classes, the fatal obstacle they presented to any general elevation of the standard of humanity. Yet the attitude of the Pagans decisively proves that no progress of philosophy or social civilisation was likely, for a very long period, to have extirpated them; and it can hardly be doubted that, had they been flourishing unchallenged as in the days of Trajan, when the rude warriors of the North obtained the empire of Italy, they would have been eagerly adopted by the conquerors, would have taken deep root in mediæval life, and have indefinitely retarded the progress of humanity. Christianity alone was powerful enough to tear this evil plant from the Roman soil. The Christian custom of legacies for the relief of the indigent and suffering replaced the Pagan custom of bequeathing sums of money for games in honour of the dead; and the month of December, which was looked forward to with eagerness through all the Roman world, as the special season of the gladiatorial spectacles, was consecrated in the Church by another festival commemorative of the advent of Christ.

The notion of the sanctity of human life, which led the early Christians to combat and at last to overthrow the [pg 039] gladiatorial games, was carried by some of them to an extent altogether irreconcilable with national independence, and with the prevailing penal system. Many of them taught that no Christian might lawfully take away life, either as a soldier, or by bringing a capital charge, or by acting as an executioner. The first of these questions it will be convenient to reserve for a later period of this chapter, when I propose to examine the relations of Christianity to the military spirit, and a very few words will be sufficient to dispose of the others. The notion that there is something impure and defiling, even in a just execution, is one which may be traced through many ages; and executioners, as the ministers of the law, have been from very ancient times regarded as unholy. In both Greece and Rome the law compelled them to live outside the walls, and at Rhodes they were never permitted even to enter the city.65 Notions of this kind were very strongly held in the early Church; and a decree of the penitential discipline which was enforced, even against emperors and generals, forbade any one whose hands had been imbrued in blood, even when that blood was shed in a righteous war, approaching the altar without a preparatory period of penance. The opinions of the Christians of the first three centuries were usually formed without any regard to the necessities of civil or political life; but when the Church obtained an ascendancy, it was found necessary speedily to modify them; and although Lactantius, in the fourth century, maintained the unlawfulness of all bloodshed,66 as strongly as Origen in the third, and Tertullian in the second, the common doctrine was simply that no priest or bishop must take any part in a capital charge. From this exceptional position of the clergy they speedily acquired the position of official intercessors for [pg 040] criminals, ambassadors of mercy, when, from some act of sedition or other cause, their city or neighbourhood was menaced with a bloody invasion. The right of sanctuary, which was before possessed by the Imperial statues and by the Pagan temples, was accorded to the churches. During the holy seasons of Lent and Easter, no criminal trials could be held, and no criminal could be tortured or executed.67 Miracles, it was said, were sometimes wrought to attest the innocence of accused or condemned men, but were never wrought to consign criminals to execution by the civil power.68

All this had an importance much beyond its immediate effect in tempering the administration of the law. It contributed largely to associate in the popular imagination the ideas of sanctity and of mercy, and to increase the reverence for human life. It had also another remarkable effect, to which I have adverted in another work. The belief that it was wrong for a priest to bring any charge that could give rise to a capital sentence caused the leading clergy to shrink from persecuting heresy to death, at a time when in all other respects the theory of persecution had been fully matured. When it was readily admitted that heresy was in the highest degree criminal, and ought to be made penal, when laws banishing, fining, or imprisoning heretics filled the statute-book, and when every vestige of religious liberty was suppressed at [pg 041] the instigation of the clergy, these still shrank from the last and inevitable step, not because it was an atrocious violation of the rights of conscience, but because it was contrary to the ecclesiastical discipline for a bishop, under any circumstances, to countenance bloodshed. It was on this ground that St. Augustine, while eagerly advocating the persecution of the Donatists, more than once expressed a wish that they should not be punished with death, and that St. Ambrose, and St. Martin of Tours, who were both energetic persecutors, expressed their abhorrence of the Spanish bishops, who had caused some Priscillianists to be executed. I have elsewhere noticed the odious hypocrisy of the later inquisitors, who relegated the execution of the sentence to the civil power, with a prayer that the heretics should be punished “as mildly as possible and without the effusion of blood,”69 which came at last to be interpreted, by the death of fire; but I may here add, that this hideous mockery is not unique in the history of religion. Plutarch suggests that one of the reasons for burying unchaste vestals alive was that they were so sacred that it was unlawful to lay violent hands upon them,70 and among the Donatists the Circumcelliones were for a time accustomed to abstain, in obedience to the evangelical command, from the use of the sword, while they beat to death those who differed from their theological opinions with massive clubs, to which they gave the very significant name of Israelites.71

The time came when the Christian priests shed blood enough. The extreme scrupulosity, however, which they at first displayed, is not only exceedingly curious when contrasted with their later history; it was also, by the association of ideas which it promoted, very favourable to humanity. [pg 042] It is remarkable, however, that while some of the early Fathers were the undoubted precursors of Beccaria, their teaching, unlike that of the philosophers in the eighteenth century, had little or no appreciable influence in mitigating the severity of the penal code. Indeed, the more carefully the Christian legislation of the Empire is examined, and the more fully it is compared with what had been done under the influence of Stoicism by the Pagan legislators, the more evident, I think, it will appear that the golden age of Roman law was not Christian, but Pagan. Great works of codification were accomplished under the younger Theodosius, and under Justinian; but it was in the reign of Pagan emperors, and especially of Hadrian and Alexander Severus, that nearly all the most important measures were taken, redressing injustices, elevating oppressed classes, and making the doctrine of the natural equality and fraternity of mankind the basis of legal enactments. Receiving the heritage of these laws, the Christians, no doubt, added something; but a careful examination will show that it was surprisingly little. In no respect is the greatness of the Stoic philosophers more conspicuous than in the contrast between the gigantic steps of legal reform made in a few years under their influence, and the almost insignificant steps taken when Christianity had obtained an ascendancy in the Empire, not to speak of the long period of decrepitude that followed. In the way of mitigating the severity of punishments, Constantine made, it is true, three important laws prohibiting the custom of branding criminals upon the face, the condemnation of criminals as gladiators, and the continuance of the once degrading but now sacred punishment of crucifixion, which had been very commonly employed; but these measures were more than counterbalanced by the extreme severity with which the Christian emperors punished infanticide, adultery, seduction, rape, and several other crimes, and the number of capital offences became considerably greater [pg 043] than before.72 The most prominent evidence, indeed, of ecclesiastical influence in the Theodosian code is that which must be most lamented. It is the immense mass of legislation, intended on the one hand to elevate the clergy into a separate and sacred caste, and on the other to persecute in every form, and with every degree of violence, all who deviated from the fine line of Catholic orthodoxy.73

The last consequence of the Christian estimate of human life was a very emphatic condemnation of suicide. We have already seen that the arguments of the Pagan moralists, who were opposed to this act, were of four kinds. The religious argument of Pythagoras and Plato was, that we are all soldiers of God, placed in an appointed post of duty, which it is a rebellion against our Maker to desert. The civic argument of Aristotle and the Greek legislators was that we owe our services to the State, and that therefore voluntarily to abandon life is to abandon our duty to our country. The argument which Plutarch and other writers derived from human dignity was that true courage is shown in the manful endurance of suffering, while suicide, being an act of flight, is an act of cowardice, and therefore unworthy of man. The mystical or Quietist argument of the Neoplatonists was that all perturbation is a pollution of the soul; that the act of suicide is accompanied by, and springs from, perturbation, [pg 044] and that therefore the perpetrator ends his days by a crime. Of these four arguments, the last cannot, I think, be said to have had any place among the Christian dissuasives from suicide, and the influence of the second was almost imperceptible. The notion of patriotism being a moral duty was habitually discouraged in the early Church; and it was impossible to urge the civic argument against suicide without at the same time condemning the hermit life, which in the third century became the ideal of the Church. The duty a man owes to his family, which a modern moralist would deem the most obvious and, perhaps, the most conclusive proof of the general criminality of suicide, and which may be said to have replaced the civic argument, was scarcely noticed either by the Pagans or the early Christians. The first were accustomed to lay so much stress upon the authority, that they scarcely recognised the duties, of the father; and the latter were too anxious to attach all their ethics to the interests of another world, to do much to supply the omission. The Christian estimate of the duty of humility, and of the degradation of man, rendered appeals to human dignity somewhat uncongenial to the patristic writers; yet these writers frequently dilated upon the true courage of patience, in language to which their own heroism under persecution gave a noble emphasis. To the example of Cato they opposed those of Regulus and Job, the courage that endures suffering to the courage that confronts death. The Platonic doctrine, that we are servants of the Deity, placed upon earth to perform our allotted task in His sight, with His assistance, and by His will, they continually enforced and most deeply realised; and this doctrine was in itself, in most cases, a sufficient preventive; for, as a great writer has said: “Though there are many crimes of a deeper dye than suicide, there is no other by which men appear so formally to renounce the protection of God.”74

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But, in addition to this general teaching, the Christian theologians introduced into the sphere we are considering new elements both of terrorism and of persuasion, which have had a decisive influence upon the judgments of mankind. They carried their doctrine of the sanctity of human life to such a point that they maintained dogmatically that a man who destroys his own life has committed a crime similar both in kind and magnitude to that of an ordinary murderer,75 and they at the same time gave a new character to death by their doctrines concerning its penal nature and concerning the future destinies of the soul. On the other hand, the high position assigned to resignation in the moral scale, the hope of future happiness, which casts a ray of light upon the darkest calamities of life, the deeper and more subtle consolations arising from the feeling of trust and from the outpouring of prayer, and, above all, the Christian doctrine of the remedial and providential character of suffering, have proved sufficient protection against despair. The Christian doctrine, that pain is a good, had in this respect an influence that was never attained by the Pagan doctrine, that pain is not an evil.

There were, however, two forms of suicide which were regarded in the early Church with some tolerance or hesitation. During the frenzy excited by persecution, and under the influence of the belief that martyrdom effaced in a moment the sins of a life, and introduced the sufferer at once into celestial joys, it was not uncommon for men, in a transport of enthusiasm, to rush before the Pagan judges, imploring [pg 046] or provoking martyrdom; and some of the ecclesiastical writers have spoken of these men with considerable admiration,76 though the general tone of the patristic writings and the councils of the Church condemned them. A more serious difficulty arose about Christian women who committed suicide to guard their chastity when menaced by the infamous sentences of their persecutors, or more frequently by the lust of emperors, or by barbarian invaders. St. Pelagia, a girl of only fifteen, who has been canonised by the Church, and who was warmly eulogised by St. Ambrose and St. Chrysostom, having been captured by the soldiery, obtained permission to retire to her room for the purpose of robing herself, mounted to the roof of the house, and, flinging herself down, perished by the fall.77 A Christian lady of Antioch, named Domnina, had two daughters renowned alike for their beauty and their piety. Being captured during the Diocletian persecution, and fearing the loss of their chastity, they agreed by one bold act to free themselves from the danger, and, casting themselves into a river by the way, mother and daughters sank unsullied in the wave.78 The tyrant Maxentius was fascinated by the beauty of a Christian lady, the wife of the Prefect of Rome. Having sought in vain to elude his addresses, having been dragged from her house by the minions of the tyrant, the faithful wife obtained permission, before yielding to her master's embraces, to retire for a moment into her chamber, and she there, with true Roman courage, stabbed herself to the heart.79 Some Protestant [pg 047] controversialists have been scandalised,80 and some Catholic controversialists perplexed, by the undisguised admiration with which the early ecclesiastical writers narrate these histories. To those who have not suffered theological opinions to destroy all their natural sense of nobility it will need no defence.

This was the only form of avowed suicide which was in any degree permitted in the early Church. St. Ambrose rather timidly, and St. Jerome more strongly, commended it; but at the time when the capture of Rome by the soldiers of Alaric made the question one of pressing interest, St. Augustine devoted an elaborate examination to the subject, and while expressing his pitying admiration for the virgin suicides, decidedly condemned their act.81 His opinion of the absolute sinfulness of suicide has since been generally adopted by the Catholic theologians, who pretend that Pelagia and Domnina acted under the impulse of a special revelation.82 At the same time, by a glaring though very natural [pg 048] inconsistency, no characters were more enthusiastically extolled than those anchorites who habitually deprived their bodies of the sustenance that was absolutely necessary to health, and thus manifestly abridged their lives. St. Jerome has preserved a curious illustration of the feeling with which these slow suicides were regarded by the outer world, in his account of the life and death of a young nun named Blesilla. This lady had been guilty of what, according to the religious notions of the fourth century, was, at least, the frivolity of marrying, but was left a widow seven months afterwards, having thus “lost at once the crown of virginity and the pleasure of marriage.”83 An attack of illness inspired her with strong religious feelings. At the age of twenty she retired to a convent. She attained such a height of devotion that, according to the very characteristic eulogy of her biographer, “she was more sorry for the loss of her virginity than for the decease of her husband;”84 and a long succession of atrocious penances preceded, if they did not produce, her death.85 The conviction that she had been killed by fasting, and the spectacle of the uncontrollable grief of her mother, filled the populace with indignation, and the funeral was disturbed by tumultuous cries that the “accursed race of monks should be banished from the city, stoned, or drowned.”86 In the Church itself, however, we find very few traces of any condemnation of the custom of undermining the constitution by austerities,87 and if we may believe but a small part of [pg 049] what is related of the habits of the early and mediæval monks, great numbers of them must have thus shortened their days. There is a touching story told by St. Bonaventura, of St. Francis Assisi, who was one of these victims to asceticism. As the dying saint sank back exhausted with spitting blood, he avowed, as he looked upon his emaciated body, that “he had sinned against his brother, the ass;” and then, the feeling of his mind taking, as was usual with him, the form of an hallucination, he imagined that, when at prayer during the night, he heard a voice saying: “Francis, there is no sinner in the world whom, if he be converted, God will not pardon; but he who kills himself by hard penances will find no mercy in eternity.” He attributed the voice to the devil.88

Direct and deliberate suicide, which occupies so prominent a place in the moral history of antiquity, almost absolutely disappeared within the Church; but beyond its pale the Circumcelliones, in the fourth century, constituted themselves the apostles of death, and not only carried to the highest point the custom of provoking martyrdom, by challenging and insulting the assemblies of the Pagans, but even killed themselves in great numbers, imagining, it would seem, that this was a form of martyrdom, and would secure for them eternal salvation. Assembling in hundreds, St. Augustine says even in thousands, they leaped with paroxysms of frantic joy from the brows of overhanging cliffs, till the rocks below were reddened with their blood.89 At a much later period, we find among the Albigenses a practice, known by the name of Endura, of accelerating death, in the case of dangerous illness, by fasting, and sometimes by bleeding.90 The wretched Jews, stung to madness by the persecution of the Catholics, furnish [pg 050] the most numerous examples of suicide during the middle ages. A multitude perished by their own hands, to avoid torture, in France, in 1095; five hundred, it is said, on a single occasion at York; five hundred in 1320, when besieged by the Shepherds. The old Pagan legislation on this subject remained unaltered in the Theodosian and Justinian codes; but a Council of Arles, in the fifth century, having pronounced suicide to be the effect of diabolical inspiration, a Council of Bragues, in the following century, ordained that no religious rites should be celebrated at the tomb of the culprit, and that no masses should be said for his soul; and these provisions, which were repeated by later Councils, were gradually introduced into the laws of the barbarians and of Charlemagne. St. Lewis originated the custom of confiscating the property of the dead man, and the corpse was soon subjected to gross and various outrages. In some countries it could only be removed from the house through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the wall; it was dragged upon a hurdle through the streets, hung up with the head downwards, and at last thrown into the public sewer, or burnt, or buried in the sand below high-water mark, or transfixed by a stake on the public highway.91

These singularly hideous and at the same time grotesque customs, and also the extreme injustice of reducing to beggary the unhappy relations of the dead, had the very natural effect of exciting, in the eighteenth century, a strong spirit of [pg 051] reaction. Suicide is indeed one of those acts which may be condemned by moralists as a sin, but which, in modern times at least, cannot be regarded as within the legitimate sphere of law; for a society which accords to its members perfect liberty of emigration, cannot reasonably pronounce the simple renunciation of life to be an offence against itself. When, however, Beccaria and his followers went further, and maintained that the mediæval laws on the subject were as impotent as they were revolting, they fell, I think, into serious error. The outrages lavished upon the corpse of the suicide, though in the first instance an expression of the popular horror of his act, contributed, by the associations they formed, to strengthen the feeling that produced them, and they were also peculiarly fitted to scare the diseased, excited, and oversensitive imaginations that are most prone to suicide. In the rare occasions when the act was deliberately contemplated, the knowledge that religious, legislative, and social influences would combine to aggravate to the utmost the agony of the surviving relatives, must have had great weight. The activity of the Legislature shows the continuance of the act; but we have every reason to believe that within the pale of Catholicism it was for many centuries extremely rare. It is said to have been somewhat prevalent in Spain in the last and most corrupt period of the Gothic kingdom,92 and many instances occurred during a great pestilence which raged in England in the seventh century,93 and also during the Black Death of the fourteenth century.94 When the wives of priests were separated in vast numbers from their husbands by Hildebrand, and driven into the world blasted, heart-broken, and hopeless, not a few of them shortened [pg 052] their agony by suicide.95 Among women it was in general especially rare; and a learned historian of suicide has even asserted that a Spanish lady, who, being separated from her husband, and finding herself unable to resist the energy of her passions, killed herself rather than yield to temptation, is the only instance of female suicide during several centuries.96 In the romances of chivalry, however, this mode of death is frequently pourtrayed without horror,97 and its criminality was discussed at considerable length by Abelard and St. Thomas Aquinas, while Dante has devoted some fine lines to painting the condition of suicides in hell, where they are also frequently represented in the bas-reliefs of cathedrals. A melancholy leading to desperation, and known to theologians under the name of “acedia,” was not uncommon in monasteries, and most of the recorded instances of mediæval suicides in Catholicism were by monks. The frequent suicides of monks, sometimes to escape the world, sometimes through despair at their inability to quell the propensities of the body, sometimes through insanity produced by their mode of life, and by their dread of surrounding demons, were noticed in the early Church,98 [pg 053] and a few examples have been gleaned, from the mediæval chronicles,99 of suicides produced by the bitterness of hopeless love, or by the derangement that follows extreme austerity. These are, however, but few; and it is probable that the monasteries, by providing a refuge for the disappointed and the broken-hearted, have prevented more suicides than they have caused, and that, during the whole period of Catholic ascendancy, the act was more rare than before or after. The influence of Catholicism was seconded by Mohammedanism, which, on this as on many other points, borrowed its teaching from the Christian Church, and even intensified it; for suicide, which is never expressly condemned in the Bible, is more than once forbidden in the Koran, and the Christian duty of resignation was exaggerated by the Moslem into a complete fatalism. Under the empire of Catholicism and Mohammedanism, suicide, during many centuries, almost absolutely ceased in all the civilised, active, and progressive part of mankind. When we recollect how warmly it was applauded, or how faintly it was condemned, in the civilisation of Greece and Rome; when we remember, too, that there was scarcely a barbarous tribe, from Denmark to Spain, who did not habitually practise it,100 we may realise the complete [pg 054] revolution which was effected in this sphere by the influence of Christianity.

A few words may be added on the later phases of this mournful history. The Reformation does not seem to have had any immediate effect in multiplying suicide, for Protestants and Catholics held with equal intensity the religious sentiments which are most fitted to prevent it, and in none of the persecutions was impatience of life largely displayed. The history at this period passes chiefly into the new world, where the unhappy Indians, reduced to slavery, and treated with atrocious cruelty by their conquerors, killed themselves in great numbers; till the Spaniards, it is said, discovered an ingenious method of deterring them, by declaring that the master also would commit suicide, and would pursue his victims into the world of spirits.101 In Europe the act was very common among the witches, who underwent all the sufferings with none of the consolations of martyrdom. Without enthusiasm, without hope, without even the consciousness of innocence, decrepit in body, and distracted in mind, compelled in this world to endure tortures, before which the most impassioned heroism might quail, and doomed, as they often believed, to eternal damnation in the next, they not unfrequently killed themselves in the agony of their despair. A French judge named Remy tells us that he knew no less than fifteen witches commit suicide in a single year.102 [pg 055] In these cases, fear and madness combined in urging the victims to the deed. Epidemics of purely insane suicide have also not unfrequently occurred. Both the women of Marseilles and the women of Lyons were afflicted with an epidemic not unlike that which, in antiquity, had been noticed among the girls of Miletus.103 In that strange mania which raged in the Neapolitan districts from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, and which was attributed to the bite of the tarantula, the patients thronged in multitudes towards the sea, and often, as the blue waters opened to their view, they chanted a wild hymn of welcome, and rushed with passion into the waves.104 But together with these cases, which belong rather to the history of medicine than to that of morals, we find many facts exhibiting a startling increase of deliberate suicide, and a no less startling modification of the sentiments with which it was regarded. The revival of classical learning, and the growing custom of regarding Greek and Roman heroes as ideals, necessarily brought the subject into prominence. The Catholic casuists, and at a later period philosophers of the school of Grotius and Puffendorf, began to distinguish certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid dishonour or probable sin, or that of the soldier who fires a mine, knowing he must inevitably perish by the explosion, or that of a condemned person who saves himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable fate, or that of a man who offers himself to death for his friend.105 The effect of the [pg 056] Pagan examples may frequently be detected in the last words or writings of the suicides. Philip Strozzi, when accused of the assassination of Alexander I. of Tuscany, killed himself through fear that torture might extort from him revelations injurious to his friends, and he left behind him a paper in which, among other things, he commended his soul to God, with the prayer that, if no higher boon could be granted, he might at least be permitted to have his place with Cato of Utica and the other great suicides of antiquity.106 In England, the act appears in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth to have been more common than upon the Continent,107 and several partial or even unqualified apologies for it were written. Sir Thomas More, in his “Utopia,” represented the priests and magistrates of his ideal republic permitting or even enjoining those who were afflicted with incurable disease to kill themselves, but depriving of burial those who had done so without authorisation.108 Dr. Donne, the learned and pious Dean of St. Paul's, had in his youth written an extremely curious, subtle, and learned, but at the same time feeble and involved, work in defence of suicide, which on his deathbed he commanded his son neither to publish nor destroy, and which his son published in 1644. Two or three English suicides left behind them elaborate defences, as did also a Swede named Robeck, who drowned himself in 1735, and whose treatise, published in the following year, acquired considerable celebrity.109 But [pg 057] the most influential writings about suicide were those of the French philosophers and revolutionists. Montaigne, without discussing its abstract lawfulness, recounts, with much admiration, many of the instances in antiquity.110 Montesquieu, in a youthful work, defended it with ardent enthusiasm.111 Rousseau devoted to the subject two letters of a burning and passionate eloquence,112 in the first of which he presented with matchless power the arguments in its favour, while in the second he denounced those arguments as sophistical, dilated upon the impiety of abandoning the post of duty, and upon the cowardice of despair, and with a deep knowledge of the human heart revealed the selfishness that lies at the root of most suicide, exhorting all who felt impelled to it to set about some work for the good of others, in which they would assuredly find relief. Voltaire, in the best-known couplet he ever wrote, defends the act on occasions of extreme necessity.113 Among the atheistical party it was warmly eulogised, and Holbach and Deslandes were prominent as its defenders. The rapid decomposition of religious opinions weakened the popular sense of its enormity, and at the same time the humanity of the age, and also a clearer sense of the [pg 058] true limits of legislation, produced a reaction against the horrible laws on the subject. Grotius had defended them. Montesquieu at first denounced them with unqualified energy, but in his later years in some degree modified his opinions. Beccaria, who was, more than any other writer, the representative of the opinions of the French school on such matters, condemned them partly as unjust to the innocent survivors, partly as incapable of deterring any man who was resolved upon the act. Even in 1749, in the full blaze of the philosophic movement, we find a suicide named Portier dragged through the streets of Paris with his face to the ground, hung from a gallows by his feet, and then thrown into the sewers;114 and the laws were not abrogated till the Revolution, which, having founded so many other forms of freedom, accorded the liberty of death. Amid the dramatic vicissitudes, and the fierce enthusiasm of that period of convulsions, suicides immediately multiplied. “The world,” it was said, had been “empty since the Romans.”115 For a brief period, and in this one country, the action of Christianity appeared suspended. Men seemed to be transported again into the age of Paganism, and the suicides, though more theatrical, were perpetrated with no less deliberation, and eulogised with no less enthusiasm, than among the Stoics. But the tide of revolution passed away, and with some qualifications the old opinions resumed their authority. The laws against suicide were, indeed, for the most part abolished. In France and several other lands there exists no legislation on the subject. In other countries the law simply enjoins burial without religious ceremonies. In England, the burial in a highway and the mutilation by a stake were abolished under George IV.; but the monstrous injustice of confiscating to the Crown the entire property of the deliberate suicide still [pg 059] disgraces the statute-book, though the force of public opinion and the charitable perjury of juries render it inoperative.

The common sentiment of Christendom has, however, ratified the judgment which the Christian teachers pronounced upon the act, though it has somewhat modified the severity of the old censure, and has abandoned some of the old arguments. It was reserved for Madame de Staël, who, in a youthful work upon the Passions, had commended suicide, to reconstruct this department of ethics, which had been somewhat disturbed by the Revolution, and she did so in a little treatise which is a model of calm, candid, and philosophic piety. Frankly abandoning the old theological notions that the deed is of the nature of murder, that it is the worst of crimes, and that it is always, or even generally, the offspring of cowardice; abandoning, too, all attempts to scare men by religious terrorism, she proceeded, not so much to meet in detail the isolated arguments of its defenders, as to sketch the ideal of a truly virtuous man, and to show how such a character would secure men against all temptation to suicide. In pages of the most tender beauty, she traced the influence of suffering in softening, purifying, and deepening the character, and showed how a frame of habitual and submissive resignation was not only the highest duty, but also the source of the purest consolation, and at the same time the appointed condition of moral amelioration. Having examined in detail the Biblical aspect of the question, she proceeded to show how the true measure of the dignity of man is his unselfishness. She contrasted the martyr with the suicide—the death which springs from devotion to duty with the death that springs from rebellion against circumstances. The suicide of Cato, which had been absurdly denounced by a crowd of ecclesiastics as an act of cowardice, and as absurdly alleged by many suicides as a justification for flying from pain or poverty, she represented as an act of martyrdom—a death like that of [pg 060] Curtius, accepted nobly for the benefit of Rome. The eye of the good man should be for ever fixed upon the interest of others. For them he should be prepared to relinquish life with all its blessings. For them he should be prepared to tolerate life, even when it seemed to him a curse.

Sentiments of this kind have, through the influence of Christianity, thoroughly pervaded European society, and suicide, in modern times, is almost always found to have sprung either from absolute insanity; from diseases which, though not amounting to insanity, are yet sufficient to discolour our judgments; or from that last excess of sorrow, when resignation and hope are both extinct. Considering it in this light, I know few things more fitted to qualify the optimism we so often hear than the fact that statistics show it to be rapidly increasing, and to be peculiarly characteristic of those nations which rank most high in intellectual development and in general civilisation.116 In one or two countries, strong religious feeling has counteracted the tendency; but the comparison of town and country, of different countries, of different provinces of the same country, and of different periods in history, proves conclusively its reality. Many reasons may be alleged to explain it. Mental occupations are peculiarly fitted to produce insanity,117 and the blaze of publicity, which in modern time encircles an act of suicide, to draw weak minds to its imitation. If we put the condition of absolutely savage life, out of our calculation, it is probable that a highly developed civilisation, while it raises the average of well-being, is accompanied by more extreme misery and acute sufferings [pg 061] than the simpler stages that had preceded it. Nomadic habits, the vast agglomeration of men in cities, the pressure of a fierce competition, and the sudden fluctuations to which manufactures are peculiarly liable, are the conditions of great prosperity, but also the causes of the most profound misery. Civilisation makes many of what once were superfluities, necessaries of life, so that their loss inflicts a pang long after their possession had ceased to be a pleasure. It also, by softening the character, renders it peculiarly sensitive to pain, and it brings with it a long train of antipathies, passions, and diseased imaginations, which rarely or never cross the thoughts or torture the nerves of the simple peasant. The advance of religious scepticism, and the relaxation of religious discipline, have weakened and sometimes destroyed the horror of suicide; and the habits of self-assertion, the eager and restless ambitions which political liberty, intellectual activity, and manufacturing enterprise, all in their different ways conspire to foster, while they are the very principles and conditions of the progress of our age, render the virtue of content in all its forms extremely rare, and are peculiarly unpropitious to the formation of that spirit of humble and submissive resignation which alone can mitigate the agony of hopeless suffering.