e,--I would devote myself henceforward to my child.
But after these two efforts had failed, and scorn and death had darkened
my soul for ever, when all my feelings had been wounded and nothing was
left to me here on earth, I raised my eyes to heaven, and beheld God.

"Yet still I tried to obtain the sanction of religion for my death.
I went carefully through the Gospels, and found no passage in which
suicide was forbidden; but during the reading, the divine thought of
Christ, the Saviour of men dawned in me. Certainly He had said nothing
about the immortality of the soul, but He had spoken of the glorious
kingdom of His Father; He had nowhere forbidden parricide, but He
condemned all that was evil. The glory of His evangelists, and the proof
of their divine mission, is not so much that they made laws for the
world, but that they spread a new spirit abroad, and the new laws were
filled with this new spirit. The very courage which a man displays in
taking his own life seemed to me to be his condemnation; so long as he
felt that he had within himself sufficient strength to die by his own
hands, he ought to have had strength enough to continue the struggle.
To refuse to suffer is a sign of weakness rather than of courage,
and, moreover, was it not a sort of recusance to take leave of life in
despondency, an abjuration of the Christian faith which is based upon
the sublime words of Jesus Christ: 'Blessed are they that mourn.'

"So, in any case, suicide seemed to me to be an unpardonable error, even
in the man who, through a false conception of greatness of soul, takes
his life a few moments before the executioner's axe falls. In humbling
himself to the death of the cross, did not Jesus Christ set for us an
example of obedience to all human laws, even when carried out unjustly?
The word _resignation_ engraved upon the cross, so clear to the eyes of
those who can read the sacred characters in which it is traced, shone
for me with divine brightness.

"I still had eighty thousand francs in my possession, and at first I
meant to live a remote and solitary life, to vegetate in some country
district for the rest of my days; but misanthropy is no Catholic virtue,
and there is a certain vanity lurking beneath the hedgehog's skin of the
misanthrope. His heart does not bleed, it shrivels, and my heart bled
from every vein. I thought of the discipline of the Church, the refuge
that she affords to sorrowing souls, understood at last the