that
make his heart sick there--to wait and see his part of the battle out.
And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50}
circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
licking a despotic Deity's hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation
based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves
an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
evil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand of
yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
large is _none of your business_ until your business with your private
particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this
sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
relation to the universe in a more solemn light. "Does not," as a
young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one
possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.

{51}

Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
religion and its more positive gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of
you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
must in the last resort ad