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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?" 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.
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