Again, if man had absolute dominion over his own life he could stand aloof from all influx of the natural law and avoid every duty arising from that law. A law, however, cannot give a power which nullifies itself.
The objection that suicide is licit because no injury can be done a man by an act if the man is willing to submit to the act, is irrelevant. The injury in suicide is not to man at all, but to God.
There is also nothing in the objection that a gratuitous gift may be renounced. Life is not a gratuitous gift; it is an onerous gift with obligations inseparably affixed thereto which forbid the destruction of the gift.
IV. Destruction is an act proper to a master alone. Man cannot be master of his own life; he can have dominion of things that are outside himself, distinguishable from himself, but not of the very existence of himself, which is not really distinguishable from himself. The definition of dominion supposes relation. The offices of master, father, magistrate, are relative conditions which suppose superiority over another person, not over oneself. Even God is not a superior over himself, although he has all perfection. For this reason a man cannot sell himself; he can sell only his labor.
God, who should have absolute dominion over all creatures, and who has, wills to confine these creatures to certain lines of action in keeping with the creature's nature. This is the law underlying even the moral law when it touches humanity; it is the eternal law coeternal with God's decree of creation, but not necessary as God is. When this law exists in the mind of God it is the eternal law; when it exists in the minds of creatures it is the natural law, governing the free acts of intellectual creatures. When the natural law becomes a motive to the human will, obliging but not forcing it, a law through knowledge within the consciousness of a man regulating his behavior, it is called the law of conscience.
Conscience is an act, a practical judgment on one's own action in some particular case. It testifies, accuses, excuses, restrains, urges. It is a rational faculty, not an emotional, sentimental power. Emotion blinds its judgments. Yet mere emotion, and that foolish deordination of emotion called sentimentality, are promptings which the ignorant mistake for conscience and obey. Conscience is the enlightened eye of the heart, not the vagary of any appetite that blunders into action. It must be educated; left to itself, it is guilty of all the perversions of the streets.
The natural law is immutable, not subject to recall by every rascal under the goad of the flesh. In morality what was, is; what was once right because reasonable, always will be right and reasonable. Since opposition to the natural law as applied to man is repugnant to human nature, no power can make opposition to that law licit. For the same reason this law is not subject to evolution. Truth in morality is eternal. What is ugly now was ugly a millennium ago; what was immoral yesterday was immoral in the sixth century. If our ancestors thought permissible what we know to be illicit, our ancestors were ignorant; the fact has not changed. It was as immoral to steal, lie, or murder in the day of Abraham as it is to-day.
The ultimate tendency of man is toward happiness, and, of course, happiness, or any other perfection, is impossible without existence; hence the instinctive recoil from the destruction of our life, which is the requisite condition for happiness. Even those that abnormally destroy their own life do so with horror for the destruction itself, and act thus unreasonably to escape evil, not to escape life; or they seek what they think will be a better life. We can do no other injury to a man so great as the depriving him of his life, for that deprivation destroys every right and possession he has. He can recover from all other evil, or hold his soul above every other evil, but death is the absolute conqueror. No matter how debased or how diseased a man's body may be, no one may dissociate that body from its soul, except in defence of individual or social life under peculiarly abnormal conditions; but even such defence is permissible only while the defender respects other human life and the social life, while he is innocent, has done no harm to society commensurate with the loss of his own life.
"The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment