There remains one reason for suicide which I mentioned before, and
which is thought a sound one,--namely, to prevent one's falling into
sin either through the blandishments of pleasure or the violence of
pain. If this reason were a good one, then we should be impelled
to exhort men at once to destroy themselves, as soon as they have
been washed in the laver of regeneration, and have received the
forgiveness of all sin. Then is the time to escape all future sin,
when all past sin is blotted out. And if this escape be lawfully
secured by suicide, why not then specially? Why does any baptized
person hold his hand from taking his own life? Why does any person
who is freed from the hazards of this life again expose himself to
them, when he has power so easily to rid himself of them all, and
when it is written, "He who loveth danger shall fall into it?"[76]
Why does he love, or at least face, so many serious dangers, by
remaining in this life from which he may legitimately depart? But is
any one so blinded and twisted in his moral nature, and so far astray
from the truth, as to think that, though a man ought to make away
with himself for fear of being led into sin by the oppression of one
man, his master, he ought yet to live, and so expose himself to the
hourly temptations of this world, both to all those evils which the
oppression of one master involves, and to numberless other miseries
in which this life inevitably implicates us? What reason, then, is
there for our consuming time in those exhortations by which we seek
to animate the baptized, either to virginal chastity, or vidual
continence, or matrimonial fidelity, when we have so much more simple
and compendious a method of deliverance from sin, by persuading those
who are fresh from baptism to put an end to their lives, and so pass
to their Lord pure and well-conditioned? If any one thinks that such
persuasion should be attempted, I say not he is foolish, but mad.
With what face, then, can he say to any man, "Kill yourself, lest
to your small sins you add a heinous sin, while you live under an
unchaste master, whose conduct is that of a barbarian?" How can he
say this, if he cannot without wickedness say, "Kill yourself, now
that you are washed from all your sins, lest you fall again into
similar or even aggravated sins, while you live in a world which has
such power to allure by its unclean pleasures, to torment by its
horrible cruelties, to overcome by its errors and terrors?" It is
wicked to say this; it is therefore wicked to kill oneself. For if
there could be any just cause of suicide, this were so. And since not
even this is so, there is none.