The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.

And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide.

For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic.
The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.
They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.

All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism.

Yet there is the stake at the cross-roads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion.