‘Yes, that’s the story, if you remember,’ I answered; ‘but I don’t see that Sir Thomas is favouring suicide. Not at all. What he writes there is merely a speculation on the comparative ease of different modes of dying. Let me see it.’
I took the book from his hands, and, glancing over the essay, read the closing passage.
‘But to learn to die, is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to untie or cut the most gordian knots of life, and make men’s miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil spirits, as undying substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and, therefore, they everlastingly struggle under their angustias, and, bound up with immortality, can never get out of themselves.’
‘There! I told you so!’ cried Charley. Don’t you see? He is the most cunning arguer—beats Despair in the Fairy Queen hollow!’
By this time, either attracted by the stately flow of Sir Thomas’s speech, or by the tone of our disputation, the two girls had drawn nearer, and were listening.
‘What do you mean, Charley?’ I said, perceiving, however, the hold I had by my further quotation given him.
‘First of all, he tells you the easiest way of dying, and then informs you that it ends all your troubles. He is too cunning to say in so many words that there is no hereafter, but what else can he wish you to understand when he says that in dying we have the advantage over the evil spirits, who cannot by death get rid of their sufferings? I will read this book,’ he added, closing it and putting it in his pocket.
‘I wish you would,’ I said: ‘for although I confess you are logically right in your conclusions, I know Sir Thomas did not mean anything of the sort. He was only misled by his love of antithesis into a hasty and illogical remark. The whole tone of his book is against such a conclusion. Besides, I do not doubt he was thinking only of good people, for whom he believed all suffering over at their death.’
‘But I don’t see, supposing he does believe in immortality, why you should be so anxious about his orthodoxy on the other point. Didn’t Dr Donne, as good a man as any, I presume, argue on the part of the suicide?’
‘I have not read Dr Donne’s essay, but I suspect the obliquity of it has been much exaggerated.’