a
blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can _we_ find
nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge
whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel,
that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth
living? There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about
three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that
with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal.
Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse,
reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these
belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only
offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of
this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my
words are to deal only with that metaphysical _tedium vitae_ which is
peculiar to {39} reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or
ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy,
and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality
that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career.
Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost
as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of
life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further
reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
and _Weltschmerz_ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.

Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more
recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be
destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of
certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith
compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in
holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially
a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable,
it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
normal religious reply.

Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
view of things, a