away in fury:  for each has received a personal affront.  Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act.  There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite.  But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer’s suicidal automatic machines.  There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart.  The man’s crime is different from other crimes—­for it makes even crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker:  he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr.  The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question.  Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr.  A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life.  A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.  One wants something to begin:  the other wants everything to end.  In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself:  he dies that something may live.  The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being:  he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.  And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide.  For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.  Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic.  The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.  They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body:  they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.  All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism.  Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion.  And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.  The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals.  It was not a matter of degree.  It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it.  The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far.  The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other:  these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell.  One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence.  Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren’s.  I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?