of religious faith may point to in the threatening future, the argument here advanced would justify suicide. There is nothing in which men differ more than in their various endowments with the courage of fortitude and the courage of enterprise; and it is certain that of two men equally groaning and sweating under a weary life, and oppressed by the same weight of calamity, if solely actuated by the reasoning here employed by Hamlet in the contemplation of suicide, one
would have the courage to endure the present, and the other would have the courage to face the perils of the future. Courage has been described as the power to select the least of two evils; the evil of pain and death, for instance, rather
than that of shame. If this be so, it must yet be admitted that either one of two given evils may be the greatest to different men; and courage may urge one man to fight, and another to flee, either in the vulgar wars of Kings and Kaisars, or in the more earnest trials of the battle of life.
The converse of the proposition must also be true, and cowardice may either make us stand by our arms or basely desert. The terrible question of suicide, therefore, is not to be thus solved ; indeed the only motive against suicide which will stand the test, is that which Hamlet in his first
speech indicates, namely, obedience to the law of God; that obedience which, in the heaviest calamities, enables
the Christian to “be patient and endure; ” that obedience which, in the most frantic desire to put off this mortal coil, can withhold the hand by this one consideration, that “The Eternal hath set His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.”
The motives made use of by Hamlet in his earlier and later contemplation of suicide, indicate his religious and his philo sophic phase of character. Faith in the existence of a God, and of a future state of existence, is so ingrained in his
mind that it powerfully influences his conduct, and constantly turns up to invalidate, if not to refute, that sceptical philo
