The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY. OCTOBER 1, 1908. SUICIDE

New Zealand Tablet, 1 October 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY. OCTOBER 1, 1908. SUICIDE

ECKY, the Rationalist historian, writes in" his (^lilw His t°>y of European Morals that one important r IjllljJßl determining cause of the increase of suicide in our «^^ day is ' the advance of religious scepticism and J^M^y? tlle relaxat! on of religious discipline.' Dr. Lefjp2p|t^ fingwell (a noted member of the International CbnvP»wL SreSS ° f Hy§iene and Demography) conveys a like CS^*, truth in other terms when he says in his monograph, The Influence of Seasons upon Conduct : ' Whether or not we assume self-destruction as the evidence of unsound mind, it is certain that it nearly always results from a temporarily distorted estimate of the value of further existence. ' Pagan Greek and Roman philosophy had little to teach of the meaning of life and of its goal in the wider existence beyond the grave; their highest philosophers, such as Plato, Cicero, Epictetus, Pliny, permitted or encouraged suicide. Stoicism was the glorification of self-destruction ; and ' even to those who condemned suicide,' says Lecky, it ' seems never to have assumed its present aspect of extreme enormity.' Christianity gave a new and sublime meaning to life as a sacred trust of the Creator— lent to us, like the talents of the Gospel, under high responsibilities, to make the most and best of it; and that death is not the end of all things, but the beginning of a phase of existence that is one of^ unending happiness or misery. The Christian doctrine of the origin and destiny and value of human life wrought a moral revolution in the pagan world. ' Direct and deliberate suicide,' says Lecky, ' almost absolutely disappeared within the Church.' It arose again in periods when faith lost its vigor — as in Spain during the corrupt Gothic period; in England- during and after the visitation of the Black Death and during the religious stagnation and fashionable infidelity of the eighteenth century; and in our own materialising times it has again assumed dimensions that recall the days when Hegesias taught self-destruction at Alexandria and the edge of , Cato's dagger severed the bond of life at Utica. * Catholic- teachings and principles are now — as they were when the Church was rescuing our race from Greek and Roman paganism — the best defence against the tendency to throw down before due time the sacred burden of life. Constant experience, and the unfailing evidence of statistics, show 'that Catholic communities are less suicidal than non-Catholic, that they accept better than others the solemn burden of life and, more than others, ' Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly. '

In our issue of April 26, 1900, we published a lengthy and instructive series of statistics,, from the works of Mulhall and others, illustrative of this interesting and instructive phase of a grim subject.. In this connection, a number of interesting tables and comparisons are to .be found in Chatterton Hill's Heredity and Selection in Sociology. This non-Catholic writer asserts and defends the following general principle : that that particular form of society is. most likely to survive which possesses in the highest degree the qualities of cohesion and 'integration.' The Catholic Church, he maintains, possesses these qualities in a higher degree than any of the Reformed denominations, and is (adds he) the form of religious belief best suited to the nee^ds of Western civilisation. Referring' to the statistical tables of suicide published in his work, the author says : 'An examination of these figures shows' us that the suicide rate in Protestant communities is, in every case, very considerably higher than that in Catholic communities. Whatever country we take, and whatever period we take, the same fact is always illustrated. And as ' the very basis of scientific observation is that no phenomenon in this world of ours is unconditioned, but that every effect has its cause, we must take for granted that so persistent an effect as the one above noticed must have an equally persistent cause. We are therefore justified in declaring that the integration and cohesion of Catholicism, considered as a society of believers, is greater than the integration and cohesion of Protestantism, considered as such.'

Here is one of the tables published in Heredity and Selection in Sociology : SUICIDE RATE IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES PER 1,000,000 INHABITANTS OF EACH RELIGIOUS DENOMINATION.

In regard to the fact that the figures of suicides among the Jews are in some cases less than those among Catholics, Chatterton Hill says : ' As the influence of environment is not sufficient to explain, in the case of the Catholic Church, a cohesion which, among the Jews, is undoubtedly due to environmental pressure, we must conclude that the internal organisation of the Catholic Church, and the principles on which that organisation is based, ensure a very high degree of integration.'

The author then quotes the following figures from Durkheim's Le Suicide (p. 151), which were compiled from official statistics :

COMPARATVE SUICIDE RATE IN DIFFERENT PROVINCES OF THE KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA.

We will conclude with some further figures quoted by our author :

This gruesome "subject of suicide formed, early in the year 1900, the subject of discussion at a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A non-Catholic scientist, Dr. Cloiiston, accounted for the comparative low statistics of suicide among Catholics as compared with the adherents of the Reformed creeds, in Germany, by saying : ' There they had the moral and religious element coming in, which prevented men and women committing suicide, even when mey were diseased and felt suicidal, when things were going wrong with them, and when from the reasoning point of view suicide was the proper thing.' Everything that tends to place in the background, or to undermine or destroy, belief in man's true origin, nature, duties, and destiny, is favorable to the operations of the demon of suicide.* The Vicomte de Vogud expressed 'this truth when, in Harper's Magazine for January, 1892, he spoke of the melancholy results of the philosophy of pessimism : ' Behold, we hear sounding on the peaks of intelligence a great cry of discouragement: "Beware of deceitful nature, fear life, emancipate yourself from life!"' It is the pagan conception of life .and death, revived through a neo-pagan philosophy, and indirectly propagated through the medium of schools in which the rising generation are trained to pass a notable part of the mosf impressionable- years of their lives without thought of God, or of duty or accountability towards Him, or of the judgment and the life to come. Here — as in the matter of education dealt with by us in our last issue— Catholic teaching and Catholic principles promote not alone the highest spiritual good, but even in the mere worldly order produce the best social and men taL- health.

si o o *• ■go" i i OJ — i •00 O 8 is'! Set; °-S ih dtoh ono 5 O<=> S O2 •-* illl S,S a g S5 5 mo $ AS 8 ., S~4S COfi 3 O JQo o Saxony 309.04 Hanover 212.03 WPrnß'a 123.09 Posen 96.4 Scliles. wig-Hol-stein 312.09 Hesae 200.30 260.02 tthine Prov'ce? 100 3 PomerSranden fturg w'h Berlin Weetphalin •Mgmaringen 90.1 ania 171.05 296.30 1j)7.06 SPruß'ia 171.03 ; I . Average 264,60 Average 220.00 Averagi : 163.06 Average 96.6

Country. Protestants. Catholics. Jews. .uetria (1852 59) 'russia (1849-55) 'rns3ia (1869-72) 'rueara(lß9o»aden (1852-62) Saden (1870-74) laden (1878-88) iavaria (1544-56 Savaria (1884-91) ... Vurtemburg (1881-90) 79 50 159.50 187.69 240 00 139.00 17100 242 00 135.40 224 00 170.00 51 3 49.6 69 0 100.0 1170 136.7 170.0 > 49 1 94 0 119.0 20.7 46.4 96.0 180.0 87.0 J24.0 210 0 105.9 103.0 142.0

French Cantons All OantoAs of All s Nationalities German Cantons - Catholic , !3 suicides pr 1,000,000 of total population Catholic 87 suioides pr 1,000,030 of total population Catholic 86.7 suo'd'spr 1,000,000 of total population \ Mixed Cantons in which the confessions are more or less equally divided 212 Buieides per 1,000,000 . i Protestant :53 suo'd's pr 1,000,000 of total population Protestants 293 suc'd's pr 1.000,000 of total population Protestant 326.3 suicides per 1,000,000

SWITZERLAND.

Province* with a Minority of Catholics (less than 50 per - cent) |I 2 •Hoc 2 o a 3 o o Provinces with 50 to 90 per cent Catholics. with '* more than 90 per cnt of Catholics. S.J§ 111 ■§§§, 30,0 70 t-tfi^ . Rhine Palatinate... Central Franoonia... Upper Franoonia... 167 Lower Franconia... Swabia" 157 Upper Palati-. nate... Upper riaLower Bavaria... 64 118 207 114 204 49 Average ... 192 Average ... 135 Average... 75

BAVARIAN PROVINCES.