to its possessor, useless to society, and whose bounds are already clearly marked? or shall a strong and healthy life, with all its future possibilities, be undermined and sacrificed _in addition to that which is already doomed?_ But, granting that the sublime generosity of the nurse stays not to balance the gain with the loss, but counts herself as nothing in the face of a human need, then surely it is time to urge then to permit this self-sacrifice is an error, and that to accept it is a crime. If it be granted that the throwing away of life for a manifestly unequivalent gain is wrong, that we ought not to blind ourselves to the fact, that to sacrifice a healthy life in order to lengthen by a few short weeks a doomed life, is a grave moral error, however much it may be redeemed in the individual by the glory of a noble self-devotion. Allowing to the full the honour due to the heroism of the nurse, what are we to say to the patient who accepts the sacrifice? What are we to think of the morality of a human being who, in order to preserve the miserable remnant of life left to him, allows another to shorten life? If we honour the man who sacrifices himself to defend his family, or risks his own life to save theirs, we must surely blame him who, on the contrary, sacrifices those he ought to value most, in order to prolong his own now useless existence. The measure of our admiration for the one, must be the measure of our pity for the weakness and selfishness of the other. If it be true that the man who dies for his dear ones on the battlefield is a hero, he who voluntarily dies for them on his bed of sickness is a hero no less brave. But it is urged that _life is the gift of God, and must only be taken back by the Giver of life_, I suppose that in any sense in which it can be supposed true that life is the gift of God, it can only be taken back by the giver--that is to say, that just as life is produced in accordance with certain laws, so it can only be destroyed in accordance with certain other laws. Life is not the direct gift of a superior power: it is the gift of man to man and animal to animal, produced by the voluntary agent, and not by God, under physical conditions, on the fulfilment of which alone the production of life depends. The physical conditions must be observed if we desire to produce life, and so must they be if we desire to destroy life. In both cases man is the voluntary agent, in both law is the means of his action. If life-giving is God's doing, then life-destroying is his doing too. But this is not what is intended by the proposers of this aphorism. If they will pardon me for translating their somewhat vague proposition into more precise language, they say that they find themselves in possession of a certain thing called life, which must have come from _somewhere_; and as in popular language the unknown is always the divine, it must have come from God: therefore this life must only be