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"'My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:
This life holds nothing good for us,
But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth;
I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.'"

"It ends soon, and never more can be," "Lo, you are free to end it when
you will,"--these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson's
pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the
world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain
of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides
declare,--an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the
British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates.
We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must 'ponder these things'
also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life
is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity,--nay, more,
the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.

"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the
palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of
the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings
who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in
destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the
soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,--would only the
crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a
passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real
relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the {38}
intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed,--by
the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate
the merriment from the misery."

II.

To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is
to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such
terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the
assurance, "You may end it when you will." What reasons can we plead
that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the
burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides,
have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, "Thou shalt not."
God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is