The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 1898. A WHIFF OF PAGANISM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 39, 28 January 1898, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 1898. A WHIFF OF PAGANISM.

f> IXCE our last issue went to press the submarine wires flashed a pitiful tale of the self-destruction f} of a number of the daughters of leading resifi dents of New York. The whole affair was highly suggestive of such a diabolical combina,C> t* 011 as tliafc of the Suicide Club, whose doings y were published some time ago, under scare headings, by the New York Tress. In the eager rush of money-getting, such news furnishes nothing more than a passing sensation. But the real grief is in that which lies in the background of all this grim question of suicide. The bibliolographyof self-destruction is, in all reason, sufficiently vast and varied. A study of the works of Baker, Mi'LiiAiiL, Morsklij, and the rest, will sufficiently indicate the fact that it is steadily on the increase. It has, in fact, long since reached dimensions which make it one of the crying evils of our day and a scandal to our civilisation. The present feverish mode of human life, the keenness of competition, the unsatisfied cravings of ever increasing needs, may, indeed, be contributing causes to that recklessness of life which seeks relief in rope, razor or arsenic. But physical pain or mental misery, by llipmh<'lvpx alone, are'not determining causes. Such ideas have been ruthlessly swept aside by the hard evidence of statistic?. The causes lie deeper. Italy, Ireland, and Spain— three of the poorest countries in Europe — show the smallest percentage of suicide. "Without exception," says Dr. Leffingwell, " that period of the year when the suicidal impulse is least felt occurs (in Europe) during the winter, when cold, hunger, and destitution are generally most severely felt." Readers of the history of the great Irish famine of 184(J-47 will remember that suicide was unknown among the suffering Irish poor during that long and agonising period of concentrated woe. The classes who live in comparative comfort seem, in fact, to furnish an undue proportion of those who lay down life's sacred burden before the appointed time. But one of the most deplorable features of this melancholy business is the apparently increasing number of mere youths and maidens — sometimes mere school-children — who fling aside God's precious gift of life — sometimes on picas as frivolous as that of Conde's cook Vatel, who killed himself in IG7I, because, forsooth, the lobster for his turbot-sauce had not arrived in time to be served up at dinner.

As a matter of fact, the extreme prevalence of suicide is but a revival — like the high-heeled boot and the leg-of-mutton sleeve. Even your suicide clubs do not possess the slender merit of novelty. The school of Hegesias, at Alexandria, was, to all intents and purposes, an association for self-destruction, on a large scale. The contagion of suicide became so great that Ptolemy was compelled to banish Hegesias from the city. And does not the recent epidemic of suicide among young girls in New York find its counterpart in a similar one which has found a record in the chronicles of Aulur Gelltus ? The spread of this contagion usually accompanies epochs when faith in the woild beyond the grave is failing, or has lost its practical hold upon the public mind. It thus serves, in a way, as a thermometer of religious feeling. Dr. Leffingwell — a noted member of the International Congress of Hygiene and Demography— writes : " Whether or not we assume selfdestruction as the evidence of unsound mind, it is certain that nearly always it results from a temporarily distorted estimate of the value of further existence." Even Lecky, the Rationalist historian, says in his Hixtory of European Morals, that one determining cause of the increase of suicide in our day is " the advance of religious scepticism and the relaxation of religious discipline."

The prevalence of self - destruction among the Greeks and Romans arose from the uncertainty with which even the best and most enlightened Pagans regarded death and what lies beyond the grave. Their highest philosophers permitted or encouraged suicide : Plato, Cicero, Epictetus, Puny. Seneca declared that the man who awaited extreme old age was " not far removed from a coward." The Stoicism of Pagan Rome was the glorification of self-destruction. Their ideal was Cato, who stabbed himself to death at Utica. " Even to those who condemned suicide," says Lecky, "it seems never to have assumed its present aspect of extreme enormity." Death was regarded, nob as the door of another mode of existence, but as a remedy for the evils of bhe present life. Society approved of suicide ; a false philosophy encouraged it ; the law expressly permitted it, and thereby removed from it the stigma of criminality; and throughout the Roman Empire the practice reached the most serious proportions. It was, according to Lecky, prevalent in every pagan land, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The suttee, or self-immolation of Hindu widows, was ordered by their sacred books. Hari-karis, or official suicides, were carried out in Japan to the tune of about five hundred per annum, by formal order of the courts. The author of Old Xcir Zealand tells how the Maoris formerly committed suicide under such slight pretexts as that of a passing toothache. And generally speaking, modern pagan nations and tribes have cither, on occasion, commanded or commended suicide, or looked upon it with benevolent tolerance. * * * :,? >£ Suicide is, briefly, a product of pagan modes of thought and action. Christianity gave a new and sublime meaning to life when it taught that it is a sacred gift of the Creator; that it is lent to us, under high responsibilities, to make the most of it ; that suicide is a crime akin to wilful murder ; that it is not ours to take life away ; and that death is but the door which leads to everlasting happiness or everlasting woe. As Miss Kemblk happily puts it : — '• A sacred burden is this life ye bear ; Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly ; Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly : Fail not for borrow, falter not for sin, But onward, upward, till the goal you win.'' The Catholic doctrine wrought a moral revolution in the world. " Direct and deliberate suicide," says Lecky, "almost absolutely disappeared within the Church." It arose again in periods when faith grew feeble, as in Spain during the corrupt Gothic period, and in England during the Black Death. It came in with a rush when religious scepticism advanced, as during the French Revolution, when it was taught by Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire, and all the leading philosophers, so-called, of the period. * * * * * The Reformation, despite its principle of private judgment (which, in the end, means free thought and action), seems to have produced no marked results in the matter of

suicide so long as the old Catholic sentiments survived: But from the seventeenth century onwards the crime became more common. At the present time Protestant populations, taken as a whole, enjoy an unenviable pre-eminence in the readiness of their resort to self-destruction. The great authority, Mulhall, says : " Suicide is much more frequent in Protestant than in Catholic countries. Legoyt and other writers show that, even in countries where both religions exist, the tendency of Protestants to suicide is greater." This he shows by quoting the rates of Catholic and Protestant suicides per million inhabitants in the British Isles, Prussia, Bavaria, Austria- Hungary, and Switzerland. Similar figures for Prussia, with a similar comment, were published by the Dnitscke Criminal Zeitinuj in 1884, and by ])r Spitzka for the United States. Saxony, " the very shrine of modern culture, the fortress of freethought," as Rev. I). llaymajst calls it in the Fortnightly Review (October 188G), enjoys a portentous pre-eminence for suicide : over 400 persons per million inhabitants doing themselves to death annually. Thuringia follows close at the heels of Saxony. Catholic France, with its godless schools, has leaped high up on the list ; while Spain and Ireland hold the cleanest record of all. He that runs can read the lesson which is written broad upon the history of suicide. It is told by a distinguished French writer, Viscombe Melchioh de Vogue, in Harper's Magazine for January, 1892. It is briefly this : That the remedy for the present lamentable prevalence of suicide is, to roll back the tide of scepticism, to return once more to Christian principles — and to begin this work at the school ; for criminal statistics loudly proclaim the insufficiency of any system of education which is severed from religion.