man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is
concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically
considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all
buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds;
but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by
the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the
things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults
everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by
refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the
cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a
tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury:
for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be
pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and
there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and
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