bhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow

That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world."

We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
ancestral Calvinism,--him who made the garden and the serpent, and
pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found
humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the
sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now,
to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer
so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to
worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'

Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
to his question about the worth of life. There are in most men
instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certainty
that you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The
thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.

"This little life is all we must endure;
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"--

says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
Meanwhile we can always {47} stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
postman will bring.

But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosi