Chap, L] DUTY OF PRESERVING LIFE AND HEALTH.

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the Apostolic age, furnishes no obscure indication of their senti-ments on this subject. They lived in a confirmed belief of hap-piness to be enjoyed by them in a future state. In this worldevery extremity of injury and distress was their allotment. Todie was gain. The change, which death brought with it, was, intheir expectation, infinitely beneficial. Yet it never, that we canfind, entered into the mind of any one of them, to hasten this de-sirable change by an act of suicide, from which, it is difficult tosay, what motive could have so universally restrained them, ex-cept a conviction of unlawfulness in the act. * It is, then, equallythe sentiment of philosophy and of religion, both natural and re-vealed, — “ All the days of my appointed time will I wait, tillmy change come. ”f

We must be still further convinced of the unlawfulness andcriminality of suicide, if we bring the practice to the further testof the general consequences which it involves. \ Indeed, thereis no subject in morals, to which the test of general consequencescan be more successfully and properly applied. Particular andextreme cases of suicide may be imagined, and may arise, ofwhich it would be difficult to assign the particular mischief, orfrom that consideration alone, to demonstrate the guilt ; but thisis no more than what is sometimes true of universally acknowl-edged vices. Possible cases, even of the highest crimes knownto the law, might be proposed, which, if they could be detachedfrom the general rule, and governed by their own particular conse-quences alone, it would be no easy undertaking to prove criminal.

When brought to this test, the question is no other than this ;May every man who chooses to destroy his life, innocently doso ? Limit and discriminate as we please, it will come at last tothis question. For, shall we say, that we may commit suicide,when we find that our continuance in life has become useless tomankind ? Any one may make himself useless, who pleases ;and persons given to melancholy are apt to think themselvesuseless, when they really are not so. Suppose a law were enact-ed, allowing each individual to destroy every man he met, whoselonger continuance in the world he might judge to be useless;

* Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy, p. 298.

t Job xiv. 14. $ See above, pp. 33-37.