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Our Conscience

  • Author: B-6594
  • Editor: B-6591
  • Newspaper: The Umpire volume 2
  • Page Number:
  • Date: 10 15 1913
  • Tags:
  • advice

MORAL ESSAYS By B 6594 OUR CONSCIENCE Oh, the Conscience! What a wonderful faculty it is! It deals not only with the affairs of this life but brings the soul face to face with God. As a stern and incorruptible judge it lays down the law in all its points and bearings, and fixes upon the transgressor a sense of guilt from which he cannot escape. Secrets of guilt are never safe from detection. True it is that Providence has so ordained and doth so govern things that those who break the law of heaven must reap the terrible consequences. Discovery must come, and will come, sooner or later. A guilty soul cannot keep its own secret. It is to itself; or, rather, it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labors under its guilty possession, and knows not what to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such an inhabitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment it does not acknowledge to God or man. A vulture is devouring it; it can ask no sympathy or assistance, either from heaven or earth. It must be confined, it will be confined. We should have "always a conscience void of offense toward God, and toward men." To disobey conscience is to commit the last disloyalty. It is to learn to be untrue to ourselves. If we are untrue to ourselves we must reap the terrible consequences. Illuminate, reinforce and educate conscience as well as you can, but recollect that in the last resort it is a peremptory judge that it is better to obey it, mistaken even if it be in some degree, than to disobey it, and thereby run the risk of passing over a judgment, the nearest representative for us of the judgment of God. You may say, when I urge you to this exact and earnest obedience that I am asking you to precipitate yourself, at any rate sometimes, into the gulf of sheer loss...... Duty done is never sheer loss. Self-interest demands something else, but, believe me, you and I live in a world of eternity, and the passing conditions of a passing time are no measurement of the final effects of that which is done by a being that shall live forever.