The death of a great tyrant or
persecutor may be a blessing to the universe, but his death by the
hand of an assassin is an intolerable evil. So is death, as the
schoolmen say, _in facto esse_, and everlasting rest, better than a
bitter life, but not death _in fieri_, when that means dying by your
own hand. There the unnaturalness comes in and the irrationality. A
mother, watching the death agony of her son, may piously wish it over:
but it were an unmotherly act to lay her own hand on his mouth and
smother him. To lay violent hands on oneself is abidingly cruel and
unnatural, more so than if the suicide's own mother slew him.
5. But though a man may not use actual violence against his own
person, may he not perhaps cease to preserve himself, abstain from
food, as the Roman noble did, in the tortures of the gout, and by
abstaining end them? I answer, a man's taking food periodically is as
much part of his life as the coursing of the blood in his veins. It is
doing himself no less violence to refuse food ready to hand, when he
is starving, on purpose that he may starve, than to open a vein on
purpose to bleed to death.
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