"Beautiful act of love".

A diplomat is a person so skilled at getting you to do what he wants that when he tells you to go to hell, you look forward to the trip.

So it is with the Devil, who in recent years has been promoting his holiday packages so successfully that people think that, like Hawaii, they're going to love the warm climate.

Case in point: assisted suicide.

The scam: a steady drip, drip of anti-life propaganda ("Disagree with euthanasia but don't deny me the right!") which has eroded minds into thinking that life is so awful that any means of escaping it is legitimate.

Indeed, given all the Oprahesque pain going on out there these days -- both physical and psychological -- taking a fistful of pills or an injection to end it all only makes sense.

The ancients thought so. The Dutch and the Australians think so too. So does Dr. Kervorkian, who has turned happy endings into a grail quest.

Last September, the world's first legal assisted suicide was performed in Australia by Dr. Philip Nitschke. Describing the death of Bob Dent, 66, a victim of prostate cancer, as "a beautiful act of love," Dr. Nitschke administered a computer-delivered injection ending Dent's life "with dignity," after the man told him he had nothing to live for.

A year ago, Dr. Nitschke could have been charged with murder. No longer. Murder is now mercy: official.

"I felt proud and privileged to help out this person who was deep in suffering," Dr. Nitschke said. "This is the first time ever a man has legally ended his life. There was a sense of history. You couldn't not be affected by it."

Sydney's Catholic Archbishop Edward Clancy was less sentimental. "I was, and still am, deeply ashamed that Australia should be the only country in the world to legalise the killing of an innocent person."

Four months later, the second incident of legal euthanasia in Australia--performed on cancer victim Janet Mill, 52 -- merited only a paragraph. For years, ethicists have been predicting that, once legalised, mercy killing would become widespread; and that taking the slippery slope would guarantee a moral decline so steep, quick, inexorable and disastrous that it would be like a toboggan hitting a tree.

They were right, of course.

Like all grand deceptions, this latest one began subtly, quietly and perniciously. And like the pro-abortion debate which went before it, the purpose of this campaign has been to convince the masses that death is the solution to life. That the compassionate response to a body in psychic or physical pain is to kill it.

And once again, the conversion process has been accomplished the usual way. By telling a simple lie over and over. The lie is this: that human suffering is a purposeless, unnecessary aberration which can and must be obliterated.

Gradually, after years of subjection to guilt-inducing lobbying, lawmakers everywhere have caved in to thinking that the sole purpose of life is not to love and serve God but to avoid pain and to stamp it out through legislation. Now persuaded that euthanasia is, in fact, not murder but a necessary and humane act, it has been enshrined in law.

And once again, the Devil has gotten his way. And he's done it by pretending he's a Care Bear.

Yet his lies cannot alter a hard truth: that suffering plays a redemptive role in every human life. Suffering is the pain that heals, though the Devil and his legions have been highly successful in convincing us otherwise.

Cardinal John Henry Newman knew better, however. He knew that all suffering is redemptive and that its use is to teach the individual and to raise and help others: "This I have observed, that such dreadful blows do issue in great blessings, and when we look upon them years afterwards, we see what mercy there is in them, and learn with all our hearts to kiss the scourge which has made our hearts bleed."

In the face of inexplicable suffering, Newman preferred cruel to cosy comfort: "Those whom God singularly and specially loves, He pursues with His blows, sometimes on one and the same wound, till perhaps they are tempted to cry out for mercy."

What nonsense such observations must seem to our modern world, a world which seeks to silence the gentle voice of the Lamb by amusing and cosseting us all to death.

Mind you, it must be said that without God, euthanasia does make perfect sense. For existentialists and compassion cops, life really is a meaningless exercise alleviated only by pleasure. It's only logical then that when profound pain enters lives sustained largely by psychobabble, people may well opt to end it all by being put down like dogs and recycled into compost.

"Never was any generation of men intent upon the pursuit of happiness more advantageously placed to attain it," said Malcolm Muggeridge in 1970. "Yet with seeming deliberation, they took the opposite course -- towards chaos, not order, towards breakdown, not stability, towards death, destruction and darkness, not life, creativity and light."

Make no mistake, it's God Himself that the Devil and his minions want to blot out. And it's the balm of Morpheus -- not the balm of Gilead -- they're using to do it.