al 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 a point, desolate
and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death
with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties
of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.
All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there
is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of
the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which
Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a
peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note
of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.
The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is
so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree.
It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, a