Vermillon 1 - Lempire des damnés (French Edition)

Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now. Only 10 left in stock - order soon. Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Vermillon 3 - La tache rouge French Edition Sep 15, Malourene et le Roi Mouille Sep 11, Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.

Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. These words have given rise to a famous controversy between two Dutch professors, named Noodt and Bynkershoek, conducted on both sides with great learning, and on the side of Noodt with great passion. Noodt maintained that these words are simply the expression of a moral truth, not a judicial decision, and that exposition was never illegal in Rome till some time after the establishment of Christianity.

His opponent argued that exposition was legally identical with infanticide, and became, therefore, illegal when the power of life and death was withdrawn from the father. See the works of Noodt Cologne, and of Bynkershoek Cologne, It is at least certain that exposition was notorious and avowed, and the law against it, if it existed, inoperative.

Gibbon Decline and Fall, ch. See, too, Troplong, Influence du Christianisme sur le Droit, p. They were brought systematically to a column near the Velabrum, and there taken by speculators who educated them as slaves, or very frequently as prostitutes. There are several curious illustrations in Latin literature of the different feelings of fathers and mothers on this matter. Scene 5 represents Chremes as having, as a matter of course, charged his pregnant wife to have her child killed provided it was a girl.

The mother, overcome by pity, shrank from doing so, and secretly gave it to an old woman to expose it, in hopes that it might be preserved. Chremes, on hearing what had been done, reproached his wife for her womanly pity, and told her she had been not only disobedient but irrational, for she was only consigning her daughter to the life of a prostitute. The girl was brought up secretly. In the case of weak or deformed infants infanticide seems to have been habitual. Non ira sed ratio est a sanis inutilia secernere.

Terence has introduced a picture of the exposition of an infant into his Andria, Act iv. According to Suetonius Calig.

Ovid had dwelt with much feeling, on the barbarity of these practices. It is a very curious fact, which has been noticed by Warburton, that Chremes, whose sentiments about infants we have just seen, is the very personage into whose mouth Terence has put the famous sentiment, 'Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto. Some, too, both Pagan and Christian Quintilian, Decl. In the Greek poets there are several allusions to rich childless men adopting foundlings, and Juvenal says it was common for Roman wives to palm off foundl;ngs on their husbands for their sons.

There is an extremely horrible declamation in Seneca the Rhetorician Controvers. By the penitential sentences, by the dogmatic considerations I have enumerated, and by the earnest exhortations both of her preachers and writers, the Church laboured to deepen the sense of the enormity of the act, and especially to convince men that the guilt of abandoning their children to the precarious and doubtful mercy of the stranger was scarcely less than that of simple infanticide.

By the counsel, it is said, of Lactantius, Constantine, in the very year of his conversion, in order to prevent the frequent instances of infanticide by destitute parents, issued a decree applicable in the first instance to Italy, but extended in A. That regulating the condition of exposed children, though undoubtedly enacted with the most benevolent intentions, was in some degree a retrograde step, the Pagan laws having provided that the father might always withdraw the child he had exposed from servitude, by payment of the expenses incurred in supporting it,2 while Trajan had even decided that the exposed child could not become under any circumstance a slave.

But this law applied only to the Eastern Empire; and in part at least of the West4 the servitude of exposed infants continued for centuries, and appears only to have terminated with the general extinction of slavery in Europe. The law of Constantine concerning the sale of children was also a step, though perhaps a necessary step, of retrogression. A series of emperors, among whom Caracalla was conspicuous, had denounced and endeavoured to abolish as ' shameful,' the traffic in free children, and Diocletian had expressly and absolutely condemned it.

Theodosius the Great attempted to take a step in advance, by decreeing that the children thus sold might regain their freedom without the repayment of the purchase-money, a temporary service being a sufficient compensation for the purchase;1 but this measure was repealed, by Valentinian III. The sale of children in case of great necessity, though denounced by the Fathers,2 continued long after the time of Theodosius, nor does any Christian emperor appear to have enforced the humane enactment of Diocletian.

Together with these measures for the protection of exposed children, there were laws directly condemnatory of infanticide. This branch of the subject is obscured by much ambiguity and controversy; but it appears most probable that the Pagan legislature reckoned infanticide as a form of homicide, though, being deemed less atrocious than other forms of homicide, it was punished, not by death, but by banishment. Cujas thought the Romans considered infanticide a crime, but a crime generically different from homicide. Godefroy maintains that it was classified as homicide, but that, being esteemed less heinous than the other forms of homicide, it was only punished by exile.

See the Commentary to Cod. It may, however, be safely asserted that the publicity of the trade in exposed children became impossible under the influence of Christianity, and that the sense of the serious nature of the crime was very considerably increased. The extreme destitution, which was one of its most fertile causes, was met by Christian charity. Many exposed children appear to have been educated by individual Christians.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 05 of 12) - Free Ebook

This form of charity grew up gradually in the early part of the middle ages. It is said that one existed at Treves in the sixth, and at Angers in the seventh century, and it is certain that one existed at Milan in the eighth century. Augustine, that Christian virgins were accustomed to collect exposed children and to have them brought into the church. See Terme et Monfalcon, Hist. Muratori has also briefly noticed the history of these charities in his CaritiG Christiana, cap. It is probable that they were brought up among the numerous slaves or serfs attached to the ecclesiastical properties, for a decree of the Council of Arles, in the fifth century, and afterwards a law of Charlemagne, had echoed the enactment of Constantine, declaring that exposed children should be the slaves of their protectors.

As slavery declined, the memorials of many sins, like many other of the discordant elements of medieval society, were doubtless absorbed and consecrated in the monastic societies. The strong sense always evinced in the Church of the enormity of unchastity probably rendered the ecclesiastics more cautious in this than in other forms of charity, for institutions especially intended for deserted children advanced but slowly.

Even Rome, the mother of many charities, could boast of none till the beginning of the thirteenth century. Towards the close of the same century, a monk of Montpellier, whose very name is doubtful, but who is commonly spoken of as Brother Guy, founded a confraternity called by the name of the Holy Ghost, and devoted to the protection and education of children; and this society in the two following centuries ramified over a great part of Europe.

Maria in Sassia-a hospital which had existed with various changes from the eighth century, but which was made a foundling hospital and confided to the care of Guy of Montpellier in A. According to another, he was inspired by an angel. Compare Remacle, Hospices cTEnfans trouves, pp.

iTunes is the world's easiest way to organize and add to your digital media collection.

At last, after many complaints of the frequency of infanticide, St. Vincent de Paul arose, and gave so great an impulse to that branch of charity, that he may be regarded as its second author, and his influence was felt not only in private charities, but in legislative enactments. Into the effects of these measures-the encouragement of the vice of incontinence by institutions that were designed to suppress the crime of infanticide, and the serious moral controversies suggested by this apparent conflict between the interests of humanity and of chastity-it is not necessary for me to enter.

We are at present concerned with the principles that actuated, not with the wisdom of the organisations, of Christian charity. Whatever mistakes may have been made, the entire movement I have traced displays an anxiety not only for the life, but also for the moral wellbeing of the castaways of society, such as the most humane nations of antiquity had never reached. This minute and scrupulous care for human life and human virtue in the humblest forms, in the slave, the gladiator, the savage, or the infant, was indeed wholly foreign to the genius of Paganism.

It was produced by the Christian doctrine of the inestimable value of each immortal soul. It is the distinguishing and transcendent characteristic of every society into which the spirit of Christianity has passed. The influence of Christianity in the protection of infantlife, though very real, may be, and I think often has been, exaggerated. It would be difficult to overrate its influence in the sphere we have next to examine. There is scarcely any other single reform so important in the moral history of mankind as the suppression of the. When we remember how extremely few of the best and greatest men of the Roman world had absolutely condemned the games of the amphitheatre, it is impossible to regard, without the deepest admiration, the unwavering and uncompromising consistency of the patristic denunciations.

And even comparing the Fathers with the most enlightened Pagan moralists in their treatment of this matter, we shall usually find one most significant difference. The Pagan, in the spirit of philosophy, denounced these games as inhuman, or demoralising, or degrading, or brutal. The Christian, in the spirit of the Church, represented them as a definite sin, the sin of murder, for which the spectators as well as the actors were directly responsible before Heaven. In the very latest days of the Pagan Empire, magnificent amphitheatres were still arising,1 and Constantine himself had condemned numerous barbarian captives to combat with wild beasts.

M3, immediately after the convocation of the Council of Nice, that the first Christian emperor issued the first edict in the Roman Empire condemnatory of the gladiatorial games. Tantam captivorum multitudinem bestiis objicit ut ingrati et perfidi non minus doloris ex ludibrio sui quam ex ipsa morte patiantur. Honorius prohibited any slave who had been a gladiator passing into the service of a senator; but the real object of this last measure was, I imagine, not so much to stigmatise the gladiator, as to guard against the danger of an armed nobility.

At Rome, though they became less numerous, they do not appear to have been suspended until their final suppression. The passion for gladiators was the worst, while religious liberty was probably the best feature of the old Pagan society; and it is a melancholy fact, that of these two it was the nobler part that in the Christian Empire was first destroyed.

Theodosius the Great, who suppressed all diversity of worship throughout the empire, and who showed himself on many occasions the docile slave of the clergy, won the applause of the Pagan Symmachus by compelling his barbarian prisoners to fight as gladiators.

Wallon has traced these last shows with much learning. To the last, the most estimable of the Pagans appear to have regarded them with favour or indifference. Julian, it is true, with a rare magnanimity worthy of his most noble nature, refused persistently, in his conflict with Christianity, to avail himself, as he might most easily have done, of the popular passion for games which the Church condemned; but Libanius has noticed them with some approbation,1 and Symmachus, as we have already seen, both instituted and applauded them.

But the Christians steadily refused to admit any professional gladiator to baptism till he had pledged himself to abandon his calling, and every Christian who attended the games was excluded from communion. The preachers and writers of the Church denounced them with the most unqualified vehemence, and the poet Prudentius made a direct and earnest appeal to the emperor to suppress them. In the East, where they had never taken very firm root, they appear to have ceased about the time of Theodosius, and a passion for chariot races, which rose to the most extravagant height at Constantinople and in many other cities, took their place.

In the West, the last gladiatorial show was celebrated at Rome, under Honorius, in A. He SHe wavered, however, on the subject, and on one occasion condemned them. See Wallon, tome iii. The difficulty of procuring wild animals, amid the general poverty, contributed, with other causes, to their decline. They sank, at last, into games of cruelty to animals, but of little danger to men, and were finally condemned, at the end of the seventh century, by the Council of Trullo. Horrible as was the bloodshed they directly caused, these games were perhaps still more pernicious on account of the callousness of feeling they diffused through all classes, the fatal obstacle they presented to any general elevation of the standard of humanity.

Yet the attitude of the Pagans decisively proves that no progress of philosophy or social civilisation was likely, for a very long period, to have extirpated them, and it can hardly be doubted that, had they been flourishing unchallenged as in the days of Trajan, when the rude warriors of the North obtained the empire of Italy, they would have been eagerly adopted by the conquerors, would have taken deep root in medimval life, and have indefi1 Theodoret, v. Christianity alone was powerful enough to tear this evil plant from the Roman soil. The Christian custom of legacies for the relief of the indigent and suffering replaced the Pagan custom of bequeathing sums of money for games in honour of the dead, and the month of December, which was looked forward to with eagerness through all the Roman world, as the special season of the gladiatorial spectacles, was consecrated in the Church by another festival commemorative of the advent of Christ.

The notion of the sanctity of human life, which led the early Christians to combat and at last to overthrow the gladiatorial games, was carried by some of them to an extent altogether irreconcilable with national independence, and with the prevailing penal system. Many of them taught that no Christian might lawfully take away life, either as a soldier or by bringing a capital charge, or by acting as an executioner.

The first of these questions it will be convenient to reserve for a later period of this chapter, when I propose to examine the relations of Christianity to the military spirit, and a very few words will be sufficient to dispose of the others. The notion that there is something impure and defiling, even in a just execution, is one which may be traced through many ages, and executioners, as the ministers of the law, have been from very ancient times regarded as unholy.

In both Greece and Rome the law compelled them to live outside the walls, and at Rhodes they were never permitted even to enter the city. The opinions of the Christians of the first three centuries were usually formed without any regard to the necessities of civil or political life; but when the Church obtained an ascendancy, it was found necessary speedilyto modify them; and although Lactantius, in the fourth century, maintained the unlawfulness of all bloodshed,1 as strongly as Origen in the third, and Tertullian in the second, the common doctrine was simply that no priest or bishop must take any part in a capital charge.

From this exceptional position of the clergy they speedily acquired the position of official intercessors for criminals, ambassadors of mercy, when, from some act of sedition or other cause, their city or neighbourhood was menaced with a bloody invasion. The right of sanctuary, which was before possessed by the Imperial statues and by the Pagan temples, was accorded to the Churches. During the holy seasons of Lent and Easter, no criminal trials could be held, and no criminal could be tortured or executed. Several earlier testimonies on the subject are given by Barbeyrac, Morale des Pares, and in many other books.

Theodosius the Younger made a law ix. As an example of the miracles in defence of the innocent, I may cite one by St. An innocent man, accused of a murder, fled to him. He brought both the accused and accusers to the tomb of the murdered man, and asked him whether. It contributed largely to associate in the popular imagination the ideas of sanctity and of mercy, and to increase the reverence for human life. It had also another remarkable effect, to which I have adverted in another work. The belief that it was wrong for a priest to bring any charge that could give rise to a capital sentence, caused the leading clergy to shrink from persecuting heresy to death, at a time when in all other respects the theory of persecution had been fully matured.

When it was readily admitted that heresy was in the highest degree criminal, and ought to be made penal, when laws banishing, fining, or imprisoning heretics filled the statute-book, and when every vestige of religious liberty was suppressed at the instigation of the clergy, these still shrank from the last and inevitable step, not because it was an atrocious violation of the rights of conscience, but because it was contrary to the ecclesiastical discipline for a bishop, under any circumstances, to countenance bloodshed. It was on this ground that St.

Augustine, while eagerly advocating the persecution of the Donatists, more than once expressed a wish that they should not be punished with death, and that St. Martin of Tours, who were both energetic persecutors, expressed their abhorrence of the Spanish bishops, who had caused some Priscillianists to be executed.

I have elsewhere noticed the odious evasion of the later inquisitors, who relegated the execution of the sentence to the civil power, with a prayer that the heretics should be punished without the 'effusion of blood,' 1 or, in other words, by the death of fire; but I the prisoner was the murderer. The corpse answered in the negative; the bystanders implored St. Macarius to ask it to reveal the real culprit, but St. Macarius ref used to do so. Plutarch suggests, that one of the reasons for burying unchaste vestals alive, was that they were so sacred that it was unlawful to lay violent hands upon them,1 and among the Donatists the Circumcelliones were for a time accustomed to abstain, in obedience to the evangelical command, from the use of the sword, while they beat to death those who differed from their theological opinions with massive clubs, to which they gave the very significant name of Israelites.

The extreme scrupulosity, however, which they at first displayed, is not only exceedingly curious when contrasted with their later history; it was also, by the association of ideas which it promoted, very favourable to humanity. It is remarkable, however, that while some of the early Fathers were the undoubted precursors of Beccaria, their teaching, unlike that of the philosophers in the eighteenth century, had little or no appreciable influence in mitigating the severity of the penal code. Indeed, the more carefully the Christian legislation of the empire is examined, and the more fully it is compared with what had been done under the influence of Stoicism by the Pagan legislators, the more evident, I think, it will appear that the golden age of Roman law was not Christian, but Pagan.

Great works of codification were accomplished under the younger Theodosius, and under Justinian, but it was in the reign of Pagan emperors, and especially of Hadrian and Alexander Severus, that nearly all the most important measures were taken redressing injustice, 1 Quest. Receiving the heritage of these laws, the Christians no doubt added something; but a careful examination will show that it was surprisingly little. In no respect is the greatness of the Stoic philosophers more conspicuous than in the contrast between the gigantic steps of legal reform made in a few years under their influence, and the almost insignificant steps taken when Christianity had obtained an ascendancy in the empire, not to speak of the long period of decrepitude that followed.

In the way of mitigating the severity of punishments, Constantine made, it is true, three important laws prohibiting the custom of branding criminals upon the face, the condemnation of criminals as gladiators, and the continuance of the once degrading but now sacred punishment of crucifixion, which had been very commonly employed; but these measures were more than counterbalanced by the extreme severity with which the Christian emperors punished infanticide, adultery, seduction, rape, and several other crimes, and the number of capital offences became considerably greater than before.

It is in the immense Under the Christian kings, the barbarians multiplied the number of capital offences, but this has usually been regarded as an improvement. The Abbe Mably says: Les Francois, en reformant quelques-unes de leurs lois civiles, porterent la severite aussi loin que leurs peres avoient pousse l'indulgence. See, too, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. We have already seen that the arguments of the Pagan moralists, who were opposed to this act, were of four kinds. The religious argument of Pythagoras and Plato was, that we are all soldiers of God, placed in an appointed post of duty, which it is a rebellion against our Maker to desert.

The civic argument of Aristotle and the Greek legislators was that we owe our services to the State, and that therefore voluntarily to abandon life is to abandon our duty to our country. The argument which Plutarch and other writers derived from human dignity was that true courage is shown in the manful endurance of suffering, while suicide, being an act of flight, is an act of cowardice, and therefore unworthy of man. The mystical or Quietist argument of the Neoplatonists was that all perturbation is a pollution of the soul; that the act of suicide is accompanied by and springs from perturbation, and that therefore the perpetrator ends his days by a crime.

Of these four arguments, the last cannot, I think, be said to have had any place among the Christian dissuasives from suicide, and the influence of the second was almost imperceptible. The notion of patriotism being a moral duty was habitually discouraged in the early Church, and it was impossible to urge the civic argument against suicide without at the same time condemning the hermit life, which in the third century 1The whole of the sixth volume of Godefroy's edition folio of the Theodosian Code is taken up with laws of these kinds.

The duty a man owes to his family, which a modern moralist would deem the most obvious and perhaps the most conclusive proof of the general criminality of suicide, and which may be said to have replaced the civic argument, was scarcely noticed either by the Pagans or the early Christians. The first were accustomed to lay so much stress upon the authority, that they scarcely recognised the duties of the father, and the latter were too anxious to attach all their ethics to the interests of another world, to do much to supply the omission.

The Christian estimate of the duty of humility, and of the degradation of man, rendered appeals to human dignity somewhat uncongenial to the patristic writers, yet these writers frequently dilated upon the true courage of patience, in language to which their own heroism under persecution gave a noble emphasis.

• Lesson Plans Life with Jeeves.
• Les Gens dici (Documents) (French Edition).
• Similar authors to follow!

To the example of Cato they opposed those of Regulus and Job, the courage that endures suffering to the courage that confronts death. The Platonic doctrine, that we are servants of the Deity, placed upon earth to perform our allotted task in His sight, with His assistance, and by His will, they continually enforced and most deeply realised; and this doctrine was in itself in most cases a sufficient preventive; for, as a great writer has said, 'Though there are many crimes of a deeper dye than suicide, there is no other by which men appear so formally to renounce the protection of God.

They carried their doctrine of the sanctity of 1 Mine. On the other hand, the high position assigned to resignation in the moral scale, the hope of future happiness, which casts a ray of light upon the darkest calamities of life, the deeper and more subtle consolations arising from the feeling of trust and from the outpouring of prayer, and above all, the Christian doctrine of the remedial and providential character of suffering, have proved sufficient protection against despair. The Christian doctrine that pain is a good, had in this respect an influence that was never attained by the Pagan doctrine, that pain is not an evil.

There were, however, two forms of suicide which were regarded in the early Church with some tolerance or hesitation. During the frenzy excited by persecution, and under the influence of the belief that martyrdom effaced in a moment the sins of a life, and introduced the sufferer at once into celestial joys, it was not uncommon for men, in a transport of enthusiasm, to rush before the Pagan judges, imploring or provoking martyrdom, and some of the ecclesiastical writers have spoken of them with considerable admiration,2 though the general 1The following became the theological doctrine on the subject: Augustine has much in this strain.

Lucretia, he says, either consented to the act of Sextius, or she did not. In the first case she was an adulteress, and should therefore not be admired. In the second case she was a murderess, because in killing herself she killed an innocent and virtuous woman. A more serious difficulty arose about Christian women who committed suicide to guard their chastity when menaced by the infamous sentences of their persecutors, or more frequently by the lust of emperors, or by barbarian invaders.

Pelagia, a girl of only fifteen, who has been canonised by the Church, and who was warmly eulogised by St. Chrysostom, having been captured by the soldiery, obtained permission to retire to her room for the purpose of robing herself, mounted to the roof of the house, and, flinging herself down, perished by the fall.

Being captured during the Diocletian persecution, and fearing the loss of their chastity, they agreed by one bold act to free themselves from the danger, and, casting themselves into a river by the way, mother and daughters sank unsullied in the wave. Having sought in vain to elude his addresses, having been dragged from her house by the minions of the tyrant, the faithful wife obtained permission, before yielding to her master's embraces, to retire for a moment into her chamber, and she there, with true Roman courage, stabbed herself to the heart.

Compare Barbeyrac, Morale des Pares, ch. Cromaziano, Istoria critica e filosofica del Suicidio ragionato Venezia, , pp. The true name of the author of this last book which was first published at Lucca in , and is still, perhaps, the best history of suicide was Buonafede. He was a Celestine monk, and died at Rome in His book on suicide was translated into French in Bayle, in his article upon Sophronia,. To those who have not suffered theological opinions to destroy all their natural sense of nobility it will need no defence. This was the only form of avowed suicide which was in any degree permitted in the early Church.

Ambrose rather timidly, and St. Jerome more strongly, commended it; but at the time when the capture of Rome by the soldiers of Attila made the question one of pressing interest, St. Augustine devoted an elaborate examination to the subject, and while expressing his pitying admiration for the virgin suicides, decidedly condemned their act. Tillemont remarks, ' Comme on ne voit pas que l'eglise romaine l'ait jamais honoree, nous n'avons pas le mesme droit de justifier son action.

He was answered by Ceillier, Cromaziano, and others. Mathew of Westminster relates of Ebba, the abbess of a Yorkshire convent which was besieged by the Danes, that she and all the other nuns, to save their chastity, deformed themselves by cutting off their noses and upper lips. S This had been suggested by St. In the case of Pelagia, Tillemont finds a strong argument in support of this view in the astounding, if not miraculous fact, that having thrown herself from the top of the house, she was actually killed by the fall!

Son corps en tombant a terre frapa, dit S. Chrysostome, les yeux du demon plus vivement qu'un eclair Ce qui marque encore que Dieu agissoit en tout ceci c'est qu'au lieu que ces chutes ne sont pas toujours mortelles, ou que souvent. Jerome has preserved a curious illustration of the feeling with which these slow suicides were regarded by the outer world, in his account of the life and death of a young nun named Blesilla. This lady had been guilty of what, according to the religious notions of the fourth century, was, at least, the frivolity of marrying, but was left a widow seven months after, having thus ' lost at once the crown of virginity and the pleasure of marriage.

At the age of twenty she retired to a convent. She attained such a height of devotion, that, according to the very characteristic eulogy of her biographer, 'she was more sorry for the loss of her virginity than for the decease of her husband;'2 and a long succession of atrocious penances preceded, if they did not produce, her death. There is a touching story told by St. Francis Assisi, who was one of these victims to asceticism. As the dying saint sank back exhausted with spitting blood, he avowed, as he looked upon his emaciated body, that 'he hAd sinned against his brother, the ass;' and then the feeling of his mind taking, as was usual with him, the form of an hallucination, he imagined that when at prayer during the night, he heard a voice saying, 'Francis, there is no sinner in the world whom, if he be converted, God will not pardon; but he who kills himself by hard penances will find no mercy in eternity.

Assembling in hundreds, St. Augustine says even in thousands, they leaped with paroxysms of frantic joy from the brows of overhanging cliffs, till the rocks below were reddened with their blood. Jerome gave some sensible advice on this point to one of his admirers. Palmemon is said to have died of his austerities. Optatus have given accounts of these suicides in their works against the Donatists.

Albigenses a practice, known by the name of Endura, of accelerating death, in the case of dangerous illness, by fasting, and sometimes by bleeding. A multitude perished by their own hands, to avoid torture, in France, in ; five hundred, it is said, on a single occasion at York; five hundred in , when besieged by the Shepherds. The old Pagan legislation on this subject remained unaltered in the Theodosian and Justinian codes, but a Council of Arles, in the fifth century, having pronounced suicide to be the effect of diabolical inspiration, a Council of Bragues, in the following century, ordained that no religious rites should be celebrated at the tomb of the culprit, and that no masses should be said for his soul; and these provisions, which were repeated by later Councils, were gradually introduced into the laws of the barbarians and of Charlemagne.

Lewis originated the custom of confiscating the property of the dead man, and the corpse was soon subjected to gross and various outrages. In some countries it could only be removed from the house through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the wall; it was dragged upon a hurdle through the streets, hung up with the head downwards, and at last thrown into the public sewer, or burnt, or buried in the sand below high-water mark, or transfixed by a stake on the public highway. Bourquelot, in a very interesting series of memoirs in the third and fourth volume of the Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes.

I am much indebted to these memoirs in the following pages. The ferocious laws here recounted contrast remarkably with a law in the Capitularies lib. These singularly hideous and at the same time grotesque customs, and also the extreme injustice of reducing to beggary the unhappy relations of the dead, had the very natural effect of exciting, in the eighteenth century, a strong spirit of reaction. Suicide is indeed one of those acts which may be condemned by moralists as a sin, but which, in modern times at least, cannot be regarded as within the legitimate sphere of law; for a society which accords to its members perfect liberty of emigration, cannot reasonably pronounce the simple renunciation of life to be an offence against itself.

When, however, Beccaria and his followers went further, and maintained that the medieval laws on the subject were as useless as they were revolting, they fell, I think, into a serious error. The outrages lavished upon the corpse of the suicide, though in the first instance an expression of the popular horror of his act, contributed by the associations they formed, to strengthen the feeling that produced them, and they were also peculiarly fitted to scare the diseased, excited, and over sensitive imaginations that are most prone to suicide.

In the rare occasions when the act was deliberately contemplated, the knowledge that religious, legislative, and social influences would combine to aggravate to the utmost the agony of the surviving relatives, must have had great weight. The activity of the legislature shows the continuance of the act; but we have every reason to believe that within the pale of Catholicism it was for many centuries extremely rare. It is said to have been somewhat prevalent in Spain in the last and most corrupt period of the Gothic kingdom,' and many instances occurred during a great pestilence which raged in England cause pra e to be offered up for h;s soul.

Thomas Aquinas, while Dante has devoted some fine lines to painting the condition of suicides in hell, where they are also frequently represented on the bas-reliefs of cathedrals. A melancholy leading to desperation, and known to theologians under the name of ' acedia,' was not uncommon in monasteries, and most of the recorded instances of mediaeval suicides in Catholicism were by monks. The frequent suicides of monks, sometimes to escape the world, sometimes through despair at their inability to quell the propensities of the flesh, SRoger of Wendover, A.

Mariana, who, under the frock of a Jesuit, bore the heart of an ancient Roman, treats the case in a very different manner. These are, however, but few, and it is probable that the monasteries, by providing a refuge for the disappointed and the broken-hearted, have prevented more suicides than they have caused, and that, during the whole period of Catholic ascendancy, the act was more rare than before or after. The influence of Catholicism was seconded by Mahommedanism, which on this as on many other points borrowed its teaching from the Christian Church, and even intensified it; for suicide, which is never expressly condemned in the Bible, is more than once forbidden in the Koran, and the Christian duty of resignation was exaggerated by the Moslem into a complete fatalism.

Under the empire of Catholicism and Mahommedanism, suicide, during many centuries, almost absolutely ceased in all the civilised, active, and progressive part of mankind. When we recollect how warmly it was applauded, or how faintly it was condemned in the civilisations of Greece and Rome; when we remember, too, that there was scarcely a barbarous tribe, from Denmark to Spain, who did not habitually SThis is noticed by St. Gregory Nazianzen in a little poem which is given in Migne's edition of The Greek Fathers, tome xxxvii.

• La socialisation : Domaines et approches (sociologie) (French Edition).
• The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 05 of 12).
• Joint Range of Motion and Muscle Length Testing - E-Book.
• The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 05 of 12).
• Thinking Out Loud.

Nilus and the biographer of St. Pachomius speak of these suicides, and St. Chrysostom wrote a letter of consolation to a young monk, named Stagirius, which is still extant, encouraging him to resist the temptation. See Neander, Ecclesiastical Hist. Pinel notices Traite mnidico-philosophique sur l'Ali6nation mentale 2nd ed. Pinel says, religious insanity tends peculiarly to suicide p. A few words may be added on the later phases of this mournful history. The Reformation does not seem to have had any immediate effect in multiplying suicide, for Protestants and Catholics held with equal intensity the religious sentiments which are most fitted to prevent it, and in none of the persecutions was impatience of life largely displayed.

The history at this period passes chiefly into the new world, where the unhappy Indians, reduced to slavery, and treated with atrocious cruelty by their conquerors, killed themselves in great numbers, till the Spaniards, it is said, discovered an ingenious method of deterring them, by declaring that the master also would commit suicide, and would pursue his victims into the world of spirits. Without enthusiasm, without hope, without even the consciousness of innocence, decrepit in body, and distracted in mind, SOrosius notices Hist.

Marcius there were none who did not prefer death to slavery. The Spaniards were famous for their suicides, to avoid old age as well as slavery. Odin, who, under different names, was the supreme divinity of most of the Northern tribes, is said to have ended his earthly life by suicide. Boadicea, the grandest figure of early British history, and Cordeilla, or Cordelia, the most pathetic figure of early British romance, were both suicides. Faery Queen, book ii. On the evidence of the early travellers on this point, see the essay vn ' England's Forgotten Worthies,' in Mr. A French judge named Remy tells us that he knew no less than fifteen witches commit suicide in a single year.

Epidemics of purely insane suicide have also not unfrequently occurred. Both the women of Marseilles and the women of Lyons were afflicted with an epidemic not unlike that which, in antiquity, had been noticed among the girls of Miletus. Sprenger has noticed the same tendency among the witches he tried. See Calmeil, De la Folie Paris, , tome i. Lisle, and also Esquirol, Maladies mentales Paris, , tome i. Hecker, in his very curious essay on this mania, has preserved a verse of their song: SAllu mari mi portati Se voleti che mi sanati, Allu mari, alla via, Cosi m' ama la donna mia, Allu mari, allu mari, Mentre campo, t' aggio amari.

The revival of classical learning, and the growing custom of regarding Greek and Roman heroes as ideals, necessarily brought the subject into prominence. The Catholic casusists, and at a later period philosophers of the school of Grotius and Puffendorf, began to distinguish certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid dishonour or probable sin, or that of the soldier who fires a mine, knowing he must inevitably perish by the explosion, or that of a condemned person who saves himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable fate, or that of a man who offers himself to death for his friend.

Philip Strozzi, when accused of the assassination of Alexander I. Sir Thomas More, in his 'Utopia,' represented the priests and magistrates of his ideal republic permitting or even 1 Cromaziano, Ist. There do not appear, however, to have been any accurate statistics, and the general statements are very untrustworthy. Suicides were supposed to be especially numerous under the depressing influence of English winter fogs.

The statistics made in the present century prove beyond question that they are most numerous in summer. Donne, the learned and pious Dean of St. Paul's, had in his youth written an extremely curious, subtle, and learned, but at the same time feeble and involved work, in defence of suicide, which on his deathbed he commanded his son neither to publish nor destroy, and which his son published in Two or three English suicides left behind them elaborate defences, as did also a Swede named Robeck, who drowned himself in , and whose treatise, published in the following year, acquired considerable celebrity.

Montaigne, without discussing its abstract lawfulness, recounts with much admiration many of the instances in antiquity. There is a long note on the early literature in defence of suicide, in Dumas, Traite du Suicide Amsterdam, , pp. Dumas was a Protestant minister who wrote against suicide. Amongst the English apologists for suicide which he himself committed was Blount, the translator of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and Creech, an editor of Lucretius. Concerning the former there is a note in Bayle's Dict. He wrote as a memorandum on the margin of his 'Lucretius,' 'N.

When I have finished my Commentary I must kill myself;' which he accordingly did-Voltaire says, to imitate his favourite author. Esquirol gives a curious illustration of the way the influence of Rousseau penetrated through all classes. A little child of thirteen committed suicide, leaving a writing beginning, 'Je legue mon ame a Rousseau, mon corps la terre. Voltaire, in the best known couplet he ever wrote, defends the act on occasions of extreme necessity.

The rapid decomposition of religious opinions weakened the popular sense of its enormity, and at the same time the humanity of the age, and also a clearer sense of the true limits of legislation, produced a reaction against the horrible laws on the subject. Grotius had defended them. Montesquieu at first denounced them with unqualified energy, but in his later years in some degree modified his opinions. Beccaria, who was, more than any other writer, the representative of the opinions of the French school on such matters, condemned them partly as unjust to the innocent survivors, partly as incapable of deterring any man who was resolved upon the act.

Even in , in the full blaze of the philosophic movement, we find a suicide named Portier dragged through the streets of Paris with his face to the ground, hung from a gallows by his feet, and then thrown into the sewers;2 and the laws were not abrogated till the Revolution, which, having founded so many other forms of freedom, accorded the liberty of death.

Amid the dramatic vicissitudes, and the fierce enthusiasm of that 1 In general, however, Voltaire was extremely opposed to the philosophy of despair, but he certainly approved of some forms of suicide. See the articles ' Caton ' and ' Suicide,' in his Diet. Men seemed to be transported again into the age of Paganism, and the suicides, though more theatrical, were perpetrated with no less deliberation, and eulogised with no less enthusiasm than among the Stoics. But the tide of revolution passed away, and with some qualifications the old opinions resumed their authority.

The laws against suicide were, indeed, for the most part abolished. In France and several other lands there exists no legislation on the subject. In other countries the law simply enjoins burial without religious ceremonies. In England, the burial in a highway and the mutilation by a stake were abolished under George IV. The common sentiment of Christendom has, however, ratified the judgment which the Christian teachers pronounced upon the act, though it has somewhat modified the severity of the old censure, and has abandoned some of the old arguments.

It was reserved for Madame de Stael, who, in a youthful work upon the Passions, had commended suicide, to reconstruct this department of ethics, which had been somewhat disturbed by the Revolution, and she did so: Frankly abandoning the old theological notions that the deed was of the nature of murder, that it was the worst of crimes, and that it was always, or even generally, the offspring of cowardice; abandoning, too, all 1 ' Le monde est vide depuis les Romains.

In pages of the most tender beauty, she traced the influence of suffering in softening, purifying, and deepening the character, and showed how a frame of habitual and submissive resignation was not only the highest duty, but also the source of the purest consolation, and at the same time the appointed condition of moral amelioration. Having examined in detail the Biblical aspect of the question, she proceeded to show how the true measure of the dignity of man is his unselfishness. She contrasted the martyr with the suicide-the death which springs from devotion to duty with the death that springs from rebellion against circumstances.

The suicide of Cato, which had been absurdly denounced by a crowd of ecclesiastics as an act of cowardice, and as absurdly alleged by many suicides as a justification for flying from pain or poverty, she re. The eye of the good man should be for ever fixed upon the interest of others. For them he should be prepared to relinquish life with all its blessings. For them he should be prepared to tolerate life, even when it seemed to him a curse. Sentiments of this kind have, through the influence of Christianity, thoroughly pervaded European society, and suicide, in modern times, is almost always found to have sprung either from absolute insanity, from diseases which, though not amounting to insanity, are yet sufficient to discolour our judgments, or from that last excess of sorrow, when resignation and hope are.

Considering it in this light, I know few things more fitted to qualify the optimism we so often hear, than the fact that statistics show it to be rapidly increasing, and to be peculiarly characteristic of those nations which rank most high in intellectual development and in general civilisation. Many reasons may be alleged to explain it.

Vermillon 1 - L'Empire des damnés

Mental occupations are peculiarly fitted to produce insanity,2 and the blaze of publicity, which in modern times encircles an act of suicide, to draw weak minds to its imitation. It is probable, too, if we put aside the condition of absolutely savage life, a highly developed civilisation, while it raises the average of well-being. Nomadic habits, the vast agglomeration of men in cities, the pressure of a fierce competition, and the sudden fluctuations to which manufactures are peculiarly liable, are the conditions of great prosperity, but also the causes of the most profound misery.

Civilisation makes many of what once were superfluities, necessaries of life, so that their loss inflicts a pang long after their possession had ceased to be a pleasure. It also, by softening the character, renders it peculiarly sensitive to 1 This fact has been often noticed. The advance of religious scepticism, and the relaxation of religious discipline, have weakened and sometimes destroyed the horror of suicide and the habits of self-assertion; the eager and restless ambitions which political liberty, intellectual activity, and manufacturing enterprise, all in their different ways, conspire to foster, while they are the very principles and conditions of the progress of our age, render the virtue of content in all its forms extremely rare, and are peculiarly unpropitious to the formation of that spirit of humble and submissive resignation which alone can mitigate the agony of hopeless suffering.

From examining the effect of Christianity in promoting a sense of the sanctity of human life, we may now pass to an adjoining field, and examine its influence in promoting a fraternal and philanthropic sentiment among mankind. And first of all we may notice its effects upon slavery. The reader will remember the general position this institution occupied in the eyes of the Stoic moralists, and under the legislation which they had in a great measure inspired.

The legitimacy of slavery was fully recognised; but Seneca and other moralists had asserted, in the very strongest terms, the natural equality of mankind, the superficial character of the differences between the slave and his master, and the duty of the most scrupulous humanity to the former. Instances of a very warm sympathy between master and slave were of frequent occurrence; but they may unfortunately be paralleled by not a few examples of the most atrocious cruelty.

To guard against such cruelty, a long series of enactments,. Not to recapitulate at length what has been mentioned in a former chapter, it is sufficient to remind the reader that the right of life and death had been definitely withdrawn from the master, and that the murder of a slave was stigmatised and punished by the law. It had, however, been laid down by the great lawyer Paul, that homicide implies an intention to kill, and that therefore the master was not guilty of that crime if his slave died under chastisement which was not administered with this intention.

1. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 05 of 12) - Free Ebook.
2. Diderot and the Encyclopædists Volume II..
3. Michael Strogoff Or, The Courier of the Czar;
4. No customer reviews.
5. Sword of Marathon!
6. Vermillon 1 - L'Empire des damnés by Chabin Laurent on Apple Books.
7. Similar Books.

But the licence of punishment which this decision might give was checked by laws which forbade excessive cruelty to slaves, provided that, when it was proved, they should be sold to another master, suppressed the private prisons in which they had been immured, and appointed special officers to receive their complaints.

In the field of legislation, for about two hundred years after the conversion of Constantine, the progress was extremely slight. The Christian emperors, in A.