Taar very few educated persons nowa-days believe in hell as a place of hideous torment on the other side of the grave; that quite as few regard heaven as anything but a figment of the imagination; that the cares and anxieties, the troubles and disappoint ments of n life spent in keen and bitter competition do diminish the value of mere existence as a means of enjoyment, are all deplorable facts, but nevertheless patent to the whole world. There is no use straggling against them or shutting our eyes to them; they are even so familiar to us and have been familiar torso long that we have ceased to be startled by them when they crop up. But Mr. James Payn, who has recently strayed from the pleasant ways of fiction into the thorny paths of philosophy, has contrived to startle us bya practical deduction which we must give in his own words:—"It is "an old joke," says he, "that annuitants "Jive for ever, bat no annuity ever "had the effect of prolonging life which the assurance companies have.
How many a time, T wonder, in these "later years, has a hund beau stayed with @ pistol or a cup of cold poison "in it, by the thought, 'If I do this, "my family will lose the money I am "inguved for, besides the premiums.' This kind of writing is distinctly mischieyous. It represents suicide as the natural refuge of a man who is too wanty to straggle with difficulty, and who recognises no restraining motives but selfish ones, the most powerful of which are, by supposition, removed. It ignores the fact that suicide is usually the symptom of a disease, and of disease, whatever it may be, which under favourable circumstances muy become epidemic. A man in the condition as regards motives which Mr. Payu describes, is in reality insane. Ata time when human life was at the merey of every vicious wretch whom chance had placed on a throne, even at the merey of every parasite who chose to make a denunciation, it was philosophical and judicious to seek to represent that as of little value which might at any moment be violently snatched away. It was but a step from this to such a conception of suicide, as the cure for every ill, as we find represented in countless passages of Seneca's letters. But five centuries before Seneca, and twenty-three before Mr. Payn, a greater than either expressed a nobler thought. "In trath "the case stands thus," said Socrates, when standing before his judges, " wher-"ever a man may be placed, whether "by his own deliberate choice or at "the command of a superior, there he ought, Ithink, to remain at every risk.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.