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think, they would see the orthodox religion rests upon suicide--that man was redeemed by suicide, and that without suicide the whole world would have been lost. If Christ were God, then he had the power to protect himself from the Jews without hurting them. But instead of using his power he allowed them to take his life. If a strong man should allow a few little children to hack him to death with knives when he could easily have brushed them aside, would we not say that he committed suicide? There is no escape. If Christ were, in fact, God and allowed the Jews to kill Him, then He consented to His own death--refused, though perfectly able, to defend and protect Himself, and was, in fact, a suicide. We cannot reform the world by law or by superstition. As long as there shall be pain and failure, want and sorrow, agony and crime, men and women will untie life's knot and seeks the peace of death. To the hopelessly imprisoned--to the dishonored and despised--to those who have failed, who have no future, no hope--to the abandoned, the broken-hearted, to those who are only remnants and fragments of men and women--how consoling, how enchanting is the thought of death! And even to the most fortunate death at last is a welcome deliverer. Death is as natural and as merciful as life. When we have journeyed long--when we are weary--when we wish for the twilight, for the dusk, for the cool kisses of the night--when the senses are dull--when the pulse is faint and low--when the mists gather on the mirror of memory--when the past is almost forgotten, the present hardly perceived--when the future has but empty hands--death is as welcome as a strain of music. After all, death is not so terrible as joyless life. Next to eternal happiness is to sleep in the soft clasp of the cool earth, disturbed by no dream, by no thought, by no pain, by no fear, unconscious of all and forever. The wonder is that so many live, that in spite of rags and want, in spite of tenement and gutter, of filth and pain, they limp and stagger and crawl beneath their burdens to the natural end. The wonder is that so few of the miserable are brave enough to die--that so many are terrified by the "something after death"--by the specters and phantoms of superstition. Most people are in love with life. How they cling to it in the arctic snows--how they struggle in the waves and currents of the sea--how they linger in famine--how they fight di
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