think, they would see the orthodox religion
rests upon suicide--that man was redeemed by suicide, and that without
suicide the whole world would have been lost.

If Christ were God, then he had the power to protect himself from the
Jews without hurting them. But instead of using his power he allowed
them to take his life.

If a strong man should allow a few little children to hack him to death
with knives when he could easily have brushed them aside, would we not
say that he committed suicide?

There is no escape. If Christ were, in fact, God and allowed the Jews
to kill Him, then He consented to His own death--refused, though
perfectly able, to defend and protect Himself, and was, in fact, a
suicide.

We cannot reform the world by law or by superstition. As long as there
shall be pain and failure, want and sorrow, agony and crime, men and
women will untie life's knot and seeks the peace of death.

To the hopelessly imprisoned--to the dishonored and despised--to those
who have failed, who have no future, no hope--to the abandoned, the
broken-hearted, to those who are only remnants and fragments of men and
women--how consoling, how enchanting is the thought of death!

And even to the most fortunate death at last is a welcome deliverer.
Death is as natural and as merciful as life. When we have journeyed
long--when we are weary--when we wish for the twilight, for the dusk,
for the cool kisses of the night--when the senses are dull--when the
pulse is faint and low--when the mists gather on the mirror of
memory--when the past is almost forgotten, the present hardly
perceived--when the future has but empty hands--death is as welcome as
a strain of music.

After all, death is not so terrible as joyless life. Next to eternal
happiness is to sleep in the soft clasp of the cool earth, disturbed by
no dream, by no thought, by no pain, by no fear, unconscious of all and
forever.

The wonder is that so many live, that in spite of rags and want, in
spite of tenement and gutter, of filth and pain, they limp and stagger
and crawl beneath their burdens to the natural end. The wonder is that
so few of the miserable are brave enough to die--that so many are
terrified by the "something after death"--by the specters and phantoms
of superstition.

Most people are in love with life. How they cling to it in the arctic
snows--how they struggle in the waves and currents of the sea--how they
linger in famine--how they fight di