RUSKIN ON CONSCIENCE by Dudley Marvin Canright

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 13, 1876

FromThe Review and Herald, Review and Herald, Vol. 47, No. 15.

RUSKIN ON CONSCIENCE.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

“It has been a prevalent notion in the minds of well disposed persons that if they acted according to their own conscience, they must, therefore, be doing right; but they assume, in feeling or asserting this, either that there is no law of God, or that it cannot be known, but only felt or conjectured. ‘I must do what I think right.’ How often is this sentence uttered and acted on—bravely—nobly—innocently, but always—because of its egotism—erringly. You must not do what you think right, but, whether you or any body think or don't think it, what is right. ‘I must act according to the dictates of my conscience.’ By no means, my conscientious friend, unless you are quite sure yours is not the conscience of an ass. ‘I am doing my best—what can man do more?’ You might be doing much less, and yet much better; perhaps you are doing your best in producing or doing an eternally bad thing.”

“All these three sayings, and the convictions they express are wise only in the mouths and minds of wise men; they are deadly, and all the deadlier because bearing an image and superscription of virtue in the mouths and minds of fools. ‘But there is every gradation, surely, between wisdom and folly.’ No. The fool, whatever his wit, is the man who does n't know his master—who has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’—no law. The wise man knows his master. Less or more wise, he perceives lower or higher masters; but always some creature larger than himself—some law holier than his own; a law to be sought, learned, loved, obeyed; but, in order to its discovery, the obedience must be begun first to the best one knows. Obey something, and you have a chance some day of finding out what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying Beelzebub and all his seven invited friends.”

It does seem good in this age of sickly sentimentalism, when the unholy feelings of men's own hearts are exalted above the law of the great Creator, to hear, now and then, some good sound talk which has the ring of the Bible in it. Such is the above. I commend it to those who have deified their own consciences, and thereby set aside the law of God. D. M. CANRIGHT.