If He were God it required no heroism to die.
He knew that what we call death is but the opening of the gates of
eternal life. If He were God, there was no self-sacrifice. He had no
need to suffer pain. He could have changed the crucifixion to a joy.

Even the editors of religious weeklies see that there is no escape from
these conclusions--from these arguments--and so, instead of attacking
the arguments, they attack the man who makes them.

Fifth, I denounced the law of New York that makes an attempt to commit
suicide a crime.

It seems to me that one who has suffered so much that he passionately
longs for death should be pitied, instead of punished--helped rather
than imprisoned.

A despairing woman who had vainly sought for leave to toil, a woman
without home, without friends, without bread, with clasped hands, with
tear-filled eyes, with broken words of prayer, in the darkness of night
leaps from the dock, hoping, longing for the tearless sleep of death.
She is rescued by a kind, courageous man, handed over to the
authorities, indicted, tried, convicted, clothed in a convict's garb
and locked in a felon's cell.

To me this law seems barbarous and absurd, a law that only savages
would enforce.

Sixth, in this discussion a curious thing has happened. For several
centuries the clergy have declared that while infidelity is a very good
thing to live by, it is a bad support, a wretched consolation, in the
hour of death. They have, in spite of the truth, declared that all the
great unbelievers died trembling with fear, asking God for mercy,
surrounded by fiends, in the torments of despair. Think of the
thousands and thousands of clergymen who have described the last
agonies of Voltaire, who died as peacefully as a happy child smilingly
passes from play to slumber; the final anguish of Hume, who fell into
his last sleep as serenely as a river, running between green and shaded
banks, reaches the sea; the despair of Thomas Paine, one of the
bravest, one of the noblest men, who met the night of death untroubled
as a star that meets the morning.

At the same time these ministers admitted that the average murderer
could meet death on the scaffold with perfect serenity, and could
smilingly ask the people who had gathered to see him killed meet him in
heaven.

But the honest man who had expressed his honest thoughts against the
creed of the church in power could not die in peace. God would see to
it that his la