SECTION I. 559 I. Advice. Maintain upon your spirit a constant sense of the crying sin of murder. The voice of blood odes to the Lord for vengeance, whoever sheds it. Have a care of indulging a favourable thought of self-murder; look upon it always with an eye of abhorrence, as an unnatural and abominable iniquity, and as one of the most wretched and hopeless practices that a: man can be guilty of. Let the terrors of God which set them- selves in array against this bloody crime, be set before your minds whensoever this temptation assaults you. , Give me leave here to borrow a page or two from a sermon preached long ago on this subject by the late venerable Doctor Increase Mather, of New- England, whence also I have derived some other sentiments in this discourse. " It is an evil thing, says he, to speak favourably either of self- murder or of self- murderers. . There have been those that have undertaken an unhappy ;work, to justify self-murder in some oases. Pagan writers have celebrated persons who murdered themselves: Fa- mous is the story of Lucretia, who stabbed herself to secure her chastity. In what we call, the second book of the Maccabees, Wm find celebrated an action ofone Rasis, fer'tvbich the Jews cry him upas a martyr; but Austin censures him fòr a criminal self-, murderer, with reasons that cannot beanswered:, " Yea, some christians have commended these, who to save their chastity, and so themselves from disgrace, have destroyed their own lives. And the crying up of such a fact, has given occasion to manyothers, to become guilty of that unnatural sin. " To exalt the persons of self -murderers to heaven, is an, evil and a dangerous practice. We should rather leave secret things to God, and to the discoveries of the great -day. Indeed if a man's life and conservation were as becomep;the.gospel, we are not positively and absolutely to say, that he is damned, though, he killed himself: Because we know not but that he . might be, at that time, under the power of distraction: And it is not impossible, but that God ,naysuffer Satan to possess, and torment and kill the bodies of some, whose souls may yet be saved in the day of the Lord. Yet on the other hand ; if: there wereno sign of distraction, appearing in, persons before they went to destroy themselves, nor any evidenceof repentance after stich attempts, we should not say such persons are gone to hea- ven, lest by being over- charitable to the dead, we become cruel to the living. The asserting that such persons are saved, may occasion and encourage others to do the like, and the everlasting destructionof bodies and souls follow upon it." II. Advice. Maintain the universal practice of piety, and of every moral virtue. Such temptations to self-murder fre- quently arise from some indulged iniquity. Men oftentimes run headlong into death, with a design to deliver themselves from
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=