Philadelphia Pastor: 'Suicide the Disease of Today'

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THE INCREASE OF SUICIDE.

Philadelphia Pastor Terms It the Disease of To-Day.

A prominent Philadelphia clergyman pronounced a scathing denunciation upon the view now taken by society of suicide. He called suicide the disease of to-day, a growing epidemic of self-destruction. He quoted from statistics the manner in which suicides of earlier days were treated and stated that the body of a suicide was impaled upon a stake.

He considered it high time that some one should record a Christian protest against the leniency with which society to-day treats the crime of suicide. In the eyes of Christ the man who takes his own life, the preacher continued, is the veriest coward that walks the earth -- a deserter and a skulker of the battle of life, and deserves to be pilloried in the stocks of public infamy.

The pastor referred to the deaths of three Christian young men from this cause within one year in Newton, and also to the prevalence of the crime elsewhere, and he noted several causes for the growing tendency to self-destruction. The first was the increase of rank materialism. The second he would call the "dying of death." The fear of death was beginning to cease to cast its shadow on life, and was being supplanted by the joy of life. The third reason he would call "life's closing doors." Many, as they looked over their lives, concluded that the "game was not worth the candle."

--The Daily Herald, Delphos, Ohio, September 6, 1900, page 3.