The Collective Conscience

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 4, 1909

The Collective Conscience

THERE is being built up to-day a complete system of “religious” instruction based on the “civic righteousness,” “national soul,” and “collective conscience” idea. The individual conscience has stood as a barrier against the encroachments in this country of a hierarchy which rules the souls as well as the bodies of the people. It is necessary to the establishment of a hierarchy here that the individual conscience should be either abolished or swallowed up. It has seemed impossible to abolish it, so the “collective conscience” idea is now brought forward to accomplish the same purpose in a different way. Says the Christian Register of recent date:—

In ethics it was once the fashion to deal almost entirely with the individual conscience. Now attention is drawn to the unfolding of the collective, or social, conscience. . . . The man with an individual conscience and nothing more becomes a bigot.

This is but another way of arguing that some men must exercise their consciences for themselves, and for other men, too. But that is precisely what they did under the church-and-state governments of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia. That was all Archbishop Laud was doing in England when the Puritans and Pilgrims fled from his fury to America; and that was all papal Rome did during the Dark Ages.