FORTITUDE. T HE epidemic of suicide of which we spoke last
week sti r cmhinues, and certainly a great part of the reasoning or . those who apologise for it, seems, like that of Mr. Ernest Clarke to be based on the extraordinary assumption that we ought to - have been given a choice whether we would live or not. How anybody could ever have lived at all, if it had not been deter- mined for him before he had acquired any power of choice or any of the faculties which are essential to choice, that. he should live, is not so much as even conceivable. The pretension that we ought to have had, before we existed, a choice given us between existence and non-existence, is a con- tradiction in terms. Nor is suicide,—except to the materialist, who, sceptic though he be, perfectly well knows that it is a. leap in the dark which may conduct him to very much in- tenser forms of existence, no less than to non-existence,— in any sense a deliberate choice not to exist. It is, only a rejection of existence under present conditions,_ and whether these conditions will be changed for the better or for the worse by this leap in the dark, neither the pro- fessed sceptic nor any one else who has received no divine guidance as to the meaning and purpose of this life,. can possibly guess. What the suicide does know is only that. by a Power over which he had—before his existence began— no control, he has been brought to a condition of what he is. pleased to regard as intolerable suffering. Well, is that a.. reason for supposing that he will change his condition for the better by rejecting what that Power, together with his own use of the alternatives which life had opened to him, may have in- dicted upon him ? If he has been forced into suffering partly ay what he had no choice about at all, partly by the deliberate uses he has since made of the power of choice that had been given him, where is the reason to suppose that he will be allowed to escape from sufferiug by the fiat of the same Power co-operating with an exercise of his own will which eannot hat be described as blind, ignorant, and impatient P It is sometimes said that a man who has chosen wrongly in relation to his career in life, is not blamed but rather praised for renouncing that career in favour of one more adapted to ids powers. No doubt. But in that case he chooses between careers of both of which he has the power to judge,—one of them by hie own experience, the other of them by all be can learn of it by observing the experience of others. That is not so at all when he renounces life itself, for he re- nounces it without having the least means of judging for what alternative he renounces it. It is not, as we have already said, a deliberate choice at all; it is a deliberate rejection of that which has been chosen for him, and which be has no reason at all to assume that he will be permitted to reject without paying a penalty. If without choice of his own he has, as be angrily declares, been compelled to live and suffer, it is surely the height of irrationality to assume that by any mere revolt of his own he can defeat the destiny he repudiates. If seems to us that even the sceptic, if he were a true sceptic, would not make the complaint that he has been compelled to exist in a condition which galls him, the ground of an inference that by a blind and violent at- tempt to throw the fetters off him, he will escape them. The true inference seems to be that he cannot fairly count upon escaping now what it was so completely beyond his own power to escape before. We maintain that the true lesson of life to a thoroughgoing sceptic would be the wisdom of acquiescence. He has come into the midst of conditions which he finds painful, partly under the control of a Power of which he positively boasts that he knows nothing,— though with a little more patience and anxiety to know some- thing, he might have learned a good deal of its purposes,- -partly by his own very defective use of the opportunities which that Power opened out to him. What can be less reasonable than to infer that without any assent of that Power, and by a sheer act of blind revolt against it on his own part, he will better his condition P If the overruling Power be an infinite mind, then it is certain that its designs will have their way, and not be defeated by a mere mortal who kicks against the pricks. If it be not a mind, but a mere Fate, still, what Fate has caused once it may cause again, and cause in either a worse or a better form. No fatalist can be otherwise than a fool who does not see that one of the first lessons he has to learn is,—we will not say fortitude, for that implies something much higher,—but at least endurance. He has become the sport of what he calls Fate, once, and he has found that the more impatient he is,. the more blindly he ,struggles with his fetters, the more they gall him. Can any net be madder than to go into open rebellion, and try to escape by an act of his own will, what has bound him in galling chains without any consent of his own will? Of course, if he is foolish enough to think that he really knows now how to escape from a Power under the control of which he fell without so much as a glimpse of any chance of resisting it, he is hardly a rational being at all. These material forces, if they have produced an intolerable life once, are just as likely as not to produce them again. The true philosophy of fatalism is acquiescence and self-adjustment to uncontrollable Power, and that, if not the germ of fortitude, is at least a beginning of that attitude of mind of which fortitude is the most perfect flower. The sceptic who chooses death rather than life, chooses he knows not what,—chooses what even by his own admission may well prove to be a sort of life infinitely more painful than that which he has so violently rejected.
But may we not go a good deal farther even on the mere foot- ing of the teaching of experience, and say that human nature has learned nothing which has added more to its general capacity and strength than the power of bearing pain calmly and well? Has anything great ever been done without it P It has been really the test, and not only the test but the dis- cipline, of every kind of true and noble purpose. It is not merely that without this proving by pain, we should not know ciao noble purpose from the ignoble, but that even noble purpose becomes all the nobler, all the purer, for the pain through which it passes. It gains not simply in confidence that it is genuine, but in genuineness, by what it goes through. Cynics say that all motives are mixed, that there is no such thing as absolutely unmixed good or purity in human life. And they are more or less right. But what they fail to see is that these mixed motives are rendered lees and loss mixed, that these alloys are more and more purged away, by the discipline of pain suffered in the cause of whatever high element of devetedness these mixed motives contain. Surely, that ought to teach us, if nothing else teaohes us, that there is a purpose, and a spiritual purpose, in all the suffering of human life, and not mere arbitrary will, still less mere chance at the bottom of it ; and, in short, that our endurance should be something more than mere acquiescence and docile self-adjustment to painful conditions, should be, indeed, true fortitude, in other words, willing submission to that which, if accepted with willing sub- mission, purifies and ennobles man. Even the mere humanist can hardly question for a moment that those who have lent most fascination and significance to human history, those who have raised the aspirations, and often even seemed to be the inspiration, of the greater races, would never have attained to that position without passing through fiery trials which both tested and purified their aims, nor that they effected this by accepting with humility and even gratitude the very conditions by which they were most sorely tried. Of course, it is true not only that men have no choice given them as to coming into existence, but that they can only rise to their full strength by accepting those conditions into which they are born, with something more than patience,—with a ready and eager resolve to make the best of them, what- ever they are. It is the faith in Providence, the raith in the high purposes of the Power which fixes us here, that alone gives us the strength to make the best of difficulties often very great, and sometimes appearing to be insuperable. But Christianity has raised this kind of fortitude into a sort of inspiration. It has taught that pain is one of the greatest and most supernatural of all the instruments employed in the moulding of our nature, and that the apparent paradox of gratitude for suffering, is in truth a paradox only to the natural and half-educated man. The very secret of for- titude is the belief in the truth of our Lord's saying to his apostles :—" Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you." The area of divine choice is infinite, while that of human choice is in the strictest degree limited. As Providence keeps the consequences of death in its own hands, it is idle to say that it gives us the right to reject conditions which we do understand, and to launch ourselves into those of which we understand nothing. Christianity has always treated fortitude as one of its very highest and most charac- teristic virtues, and even the agnostic must admit that Christian fortitude,—which is utterly inconsistent with sui- cide,—has had a much grander effect in developing human character than any kind of irritable and impatient revolt.
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