THE INCREASE OF SUICIDES.
By Editor
SOME years ago a young lady, well known to the writer, left her father's house and forsook her father's God, and married an infidel Spiritualist. It was not many years before her heart was broken, her home wrecked, her life blasted, and she was a homeless wanderer in the earth. In her distress she wrote to the great high priest of American infidelity, asking him what comfort there was in infidelity for her. She got no answer. Defaming the Bible, blaspheming the God of Abraham, pointing out the mistakes of Moses, and defending star route thieves and government plunderers perhaps left little leisure for writing answers to such epistles. About the winter of 1894 the infidel oracle found voice, and through the columns of a New York paper gave, in substance, the following advice: “When you are sick or poor, or in trouble or disgrace, and see no way out, go and hang yourself; blow out your brains; swallow poison; commit suicide.” That year, 1894, there were 4,912 suicides in the United States—an increase of 452 over the previous year; and numbers of the suicides had on their person copies of the infidel arguments showing that suicide was no sin. One New York editor testifies that a dozen instances of suicide have occurred where these same documents were in evidence in the case. When people believe they have a right to kill themselves, it does not take them long to claim the right to kill others, and that same year there was an increase of 3,000 murders in the United States, making a total of 9,800, or nearly ten times as many as would occur in a year twenty years before. Dr. Ireland, in the Journal of Mental Science, asserts and shows that “a steady and rapid increase of self-destruction is common to the whole civilized world.” Infidels boast that infidelity is spreading. Doubtless this is true; and with it murder and suicide are increasing with rapid strides. And there is the most suicide where there is the most infidelity. Most of the church-members in America are women; most of the infidels are men. But the men who commit suicide outnumber the women suicides nearly three to one. In New York in 1892 there were 805 female suicides, and 3,055 men. In 1897 there were 1,452 women and 5,078 men who committed suicide. In London, where more Bibles are printed than in any other city on earth, there are 87 suicides to a million people in a year; but Paris, gay, godless, Christless, Sabbathless, has 592 suicides to a million, or more than six times as many as London in proportion to the population. God gives to those who obey Him “length of days, and long life, and peace” (Prov. 3:2), and promises to them eternal life at last. The men who serve Satan write books inquiring, “Is life worth living?” That depends on how men live it. If you live it as God commanded, life is well worth living, for “the hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness” (Prov. 16:31); but Satan has no happy old men, and if men will serve the devil, the shorter their lives are the better, and so “the wages of sin is death.” Rom. 6:23.—The Christian.