From this point to the end of the first part of the book, it is not so much philosophy as the literature of a political revolution. There is a curious parenthesis in vindication not only of a contempt for death, but even of suicide; the writer pointing out with some malice that Samson, Eleazar, and other worthies caused their own death, and that Jesus Christ himself, if really the Son of God, dying of his own free grace, was a suicide, to say nothing of the various ascetic penitents who have killed themselves by inches.[154] "The fear of death, after all," he says, summing up his case, "will only make cowards; the fear of its alleged consequences will only make fanatics or melancholy pietists, as useless to themselves as to others. Death is a resource that we do ill to take away from oppressed virtue, reduced, as many a time it is, by the injustice of men to desperation." This was the doctrine in which the revolutionary generation were brought up, and the readiness with which men in those days inflicted death on themselves and on others showed how profoundly it had entered their souls.[155] We think, as we read, of Vergniaud and Condorcet carrying their doses of poison, of Barbaroux with his pistol, and Valaze with his knife, of Roland walking forth from Rouen among the trees on the Paris road, and there driving a cane-sword into his breast, as calmly as if he had been throwing off a useless vesture. [154] This is not original in Holbach. Diderot's article on Suicide in the Encyclopaedia (_Oeuv._, xvii. 235) contains the usual arguments of the Church against suicide, with some casuistic illustrations, but it also contains an account of Dr. Donne's vindication of Suicide, called _Bia-thanatos_, 1651, in which these remarks of Holbach occur verbatim. Hallam found Donne's book so dull and pedantic that he declares no one would be induced to kill himself by reading such a book unless he were threatened with another volume. [155] Hume's suppressed Essay on Suicide (see the edition by Mr. Green and Mr. Grose, 1875, vol. ii. 405) is a much more exhaustive argument than Holbach's, though the language of the two pieces is sometimes curiously alike. Rousseau in this, as in so many other moralities--marriage, for instance--was on the side of the Church, only allowing suicide where a man happens to be stricken by a painful and incurable disease. See the two famous letters in the _New Heloisa_, Pt. iii. 21, 22.