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self does man owe this duty. " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The one and the same law, therefore, equally forbids murder and self-destruction, and consequently the deliberate suicide is as guilty in the sight of God as the perpetrator of murder in the first degree. And since, as St. John says, " Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer," therefore, also whosoever desires to take his own life but stays his hand for some purely secular consideration, is a suicide in the sight of God and equally with the murderer forfeits, for the time at least, all claim to eternal life. Nay, more, suicide is more heinous even than murder. The nearer the relationship between the murderer and his victim the more revolting the crime. One citizen kills another; shocking! A man slays his brother; horrible! A mother strangles her child; demoniacal! A man commits suicide, embodying in his own person the red-handed destroyer and the writhing victim, and you will find no word in any language strong enough to fully express the hideous nature of his crime. Suicide is a direct usurpation of God's most exclusive prerogative, as sole arbiter of life and death. In the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy, verse 39, God says, " I alone am, and there is no other God besides Me. I will kill and make to live. I will strike and I will heal, and there is none that can deliver out of My hands," and in the Book of Wisdom, chapter xvi., verse 13, Solomon exclaims, " It is Thou, O Lord, that hast power of life and death, and leadest down to the gates of death and bringest back again!" Since, then, the union of