Conscience and Sin: Daily Meditations for Lent, Including Week-days and Sundays. S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
Ash Wednesday.
ON CONSCIENCE.
God has created man for a purpose, and that purpose is, that he should attain to everlasting blessedness.
God is good and loving unto all His works. He made the plants and the beasts, and set them ends to accomplish here on earth, but the ends for which man was made are not to be attained in this life.
Through the Fall man’s mind is darkened, his connexion with God is broken, his sight of the aim to which he should tend is obscured. God has given to him His law as the rule of his actions, that man, hearkening to the revealed Will of God, may be guided aright, and so accomplish that end for which he was made, and attain finally to everlasting blessedness.
Every act of man that is in conformity with the revealed law of God is good.
Every act of man that is contrary to this revealed law of God is bad.
Every act that is in conformity with the law of God is not only actually good, but it is relatively good—that is to say, it tends to our individual advantage. It is not only good in the sight of God, but it is profitable to our own selves.
So also is the converse true, that every act done against the law of God is actually and relatively bad; it is bad in the sight of God, and it does injury to our own selves.
Now, in order that we may be able to judge whether our acts are in conformity with the law of God, He has set in us a faculty which has the office of applying the law of God to our own circumstances; and this faculty tells us whether our acts are in conformity with or contrary to the external law of God. Thus we have the exterior law, and the interior faculty, which we may almost term a law, and this inner law is called Conscience.
II. The revealed law of God, considered in itself and in relation to God, its Author, is holy, inviolable, and inalterable. “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting (or restoring) the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever; the judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether. … In them is Thy servant warned: and in keeping them there is great reward.” (Ps. xix. 7–11.)
But though the revealed law of God is fixed and immutable, yet when applied to the human Conscience it takes different forms, according to the state of the Conscience.
Hence it follows that the divine law ill-applied, so far from being a sure rule, may become perverted into a sanction whereby we evade the obligations laid on us, and authorize ourselves to commit that which is wrong.
We shall therefore have to consider:—
1. The nature of Conscience.
2. The obligation of obeying Conscience.
3. The different kinds of Conscience.
4. The rules of conduct relative to each sort of Conscience.
First Thursday in Lent.
THE NATURE OF CONSCIENCE.
1. Conscience, which is the gift of God bestowed on all men, Christian and heathen, is that practical judgment which points out to us what to avoid or what to do in any particular emergency that may arise. Just as we may know that there are certain laws of nature, and our ready commonsense tells us, when varying circumstances arise, how we are to act so that the laws of nature may be to our advantage instead of to our overthrow, so is Conscience the commonsense application of the indwelling consciousness of the distinction between right and wrong to emergencies, as they rise up and demand of us a choice between one course or another.
2. Conscience has a threefold exercise of its judgment.
(a) Before an action takes place, Conscience throws light on the action contemplated or proposed, tells us its moral value, and if the Conscience judges that it is good, then it counsels and permits the act. If, however, the Conscience judges that it is bad, then it dissuades from, and forbids the act.
(b) During an action Conscience is active, and in spite of all the clouds of prejudice and of passion that may have risen up, it bears testimony to the true nature of our conduct, it either encourages us to carry it through, not to be supine about it, not to abandon it before it is completed, and so leave it imperfectly accomplished, but to carry it through to the end, thoroughly and completely. Or else, Conscience does not cease from turning us aside from the prosecution of the act which it disapproves; it acts as a drag, a check, and unless resisted will completely arrest us in the prosecution of that which it esteems to be bad.
(c) After an action, Conscience recompenses us by the satisfaction we feel, the approval it accords to us for having either accomplished what it advised, or for having abandoned that conduct which it disapproved. So S. Paul speaks of people being “a law unto themselves,” shewing “the work of the law written in their hearts, their Conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing, or else excusing, one another.” (Rom. ii. 14, 15.) This is the “testimony of the Conscience,” “the answer of the good Conscience” to which both S. Paul and S. Peter appeal.
3. We have seen that Conscience instructs, judges, and rewards or punishes; but we must consider further, that Conscience does not control the will of man, it merely dictates to the will what is right, and warns it as to what is wrong. It uses no constraint. Man’s will is free; Conscience clears the eyes of the mind, and shews it what conduces to welfare, and what to destruction, but it neither impels man irresistibly into the former course, nor holds him back forcibly from taking the other. It shows man what is medicine and what is poison, but it does not compel him to take one and reject the other, for the will of man is absolutely free.
First Friday in Lent.
THE NATURE OF CONSCIENCE.
(Continued.)
1. Conscience, in the order of religious life, is that which the Court of Justice is in the order of public life, a court that has been instituted by the legislature to keep discipline and well-being in the State, to protect the individual in his person, his property, and his repute.
Thus Conscience takes the general laws of God and explains them in their bearings on our own conduct, and applies them to our several cases. Also, Conscience sees to the execution of the law—that it shall be obeyed as well as acknowledged. Also, Conscience punishes every infraction of the law.
In other words, Conscience is the interpreter of the law of God, it is the judge sitting in judgment on us for our observance or non-observance of the law, and it is the executioner carrying out the sentence against us. As interpreter, Conscience enlightens us as to the requirements of God, explains to us what is obscure, and smooths the way so that our wills, enlightened and ready to act without impediment, may take a direction one way or other.
An act does not become just or sinful till the will has consented to the advice of the Conscience as interpreter, or has turned against it and deliberately gone contrary to what it has laid down. Every wilful sin is therefore a determinate revolt against God.
2. But Conscience is more than interpreter, judge and executioner; it is also our accuser and the witness