The conservative tendency of Christianity does not permit thinking of death otherwise than with the purpose to take its sting from it and--live on and preserve oneself nicely. The Christian lets everything happen and come upon him if he--the arch-Jew--can only haggle and smuggle himself into heaven; he must not kill himself, he must only--preserve himself and work at the "preparation of a future abode." Conservatism or "conquest of death" lies at his heart; "the last enemy that is abolished is death."[214] "Christ has taken the power from death and brought life and _imperishable_ being to light by the gospel."[215] "Imperishableness," stability. The moral man wants the good, the right; and, if he takes to the means that lead to this goal, really lead to it, then these means are not _his_ means, but those of the good, right, etc., itself. These means are never immoral, because the good end itself mediates itself through them: the end sanctifies the means. They call this maxim jesuitical, but it is "moral" through and through. The moral man acts _in the service_ of an end or an idea: he makes himself the _tool_ of the idea of the good, as the pious man counts it his glory to be a tool or instrument of God. To await death is what the moral commandment postulates as the good; to give it to oneself is immoral and bad: _suicide_ finds no excuse before the judgment-seat of morality. If the religious man forbids it because "you have not given yourself life, but God, who alone can also take it from you again" (as if, even talking in this conception, God did not take it from me just as much when I kill myself as when a tile from the roof, or a hostile bullet, fells me; for he would have aroused the resolution of death in me too!), the moral man forbids it because I owe my life to the fatherland, etc., "because I do not know whether I may not yet accomplish good by my life." Of course, for in me good loses a tool, as God does an instrument. If I am immoral, the good is served in my _amendment_; if I am "ungodly," God has joy in my _penitence_. Suicide, therefore, is ungodly as well as nefarious. If one whose standpoint is religiousness takes his own life, he acts in forgetfulness of God; but, if the suicide's standpoint is morality, he acts in forgetfulness of duty, immorally. People worried themselves much with the question whether Emilia Galotti's death can be justified before morality (they take it as if it were suicide, which it is too in substance). That she is so infatuated with chastity, this moral good, as to yield up even her life for it is certainly moral; but, again, that she fears the weakness of her flesh is immoral.[216] Such contradictions form the tragic conflict universally in the moral drama; and one must think and feel morally to be able to take an interest in it.