, then, shall he live? And _why_ shall he
live? he may even question. The springs of energy are broken and his
powers are paralyzed. Whatever he has hitherto done, whatever he has
tried or hoped to do in the joyous exaltation of the days that have
vanished from all save memory, he can do no longer. It is not a question
of choice, not a decision that he would not still continue his efforts;
but it is the total impossibility of doing so that settles down upon him
like a leaden pall. The blind cannot see, the deaf cannot hear, the dumb
cannot speak, the paralyzed cannot walk,--no matter how gladly they
would fulfil these functions. So he looks at his own life. His world is
in ruins, and he has no power to ever rebuild it again. In such
conditions the problem of suicide may arrive like a ghastly spectre to
confront the mind. It is a spectre that, according to statistics, is
alarmingly prevalent. The statisticians talk of periods of it as "an
epidemic." Both science and religion take note of it, discuss its
bearing upon life, its tendency and its possible prevention. It is seen
as the result of both great and of trivial causes. It is seen to follow
a great sin, and to be the--terribly mistaken--refuge of a great sorrow.
And the remedy lies,--where? It can hardly lie elsewhere than in a truer
understanding of the very nature of life itself. The only remedy will be
found in the larger general understanding that life cannot be
extinguished. One may destroy his physical _body_,--he can do that at
any moment and by an infinite variety of methods. But he cannot destroy
_himself_. He may deprive himself of the instrument that was given to
him for use in the physical world; he cannot escape from the duties
that he should have fulfilled when he had the means of doing so in the
use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could
clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible
isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown
away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one
effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime
and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by
escaping from his body, and the sooner he meets them, in repentance and
atonement, the sooner will he work out to better and brighter
conditions. If one encounters disaster or great personal sorrow, what
then? One does not throw away all his possibilities