p. 4 | AN EDUCATED CONSCIENCE by Kate Livingston Hamilton

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 6, 1887

AN EDUCATED CONSCIENCE.

By Kate Livingston Hamilton

Few discussions concerning any question of right and wrong are concluded without some one’s saying, “Oh! that is as a person thinks. Of course, if you think it wrong to do this, it would be wrong for you. If I consider it right, there is no harm in my doing it.”

While religious liberty is a thing to fight for—to die for, if necessary—it would be well to ask if the remark just quoted signifies liberty, or license. No one person should ever rule autocratically another’s conscience; but conscience, like the body and the brain, needs training. It is not infallible, like animal instinct. If you think a certain course of action right because you have studied it carefully in its origin, its connections, its harmony with the Bible teachings as you understand them, it is well. You are responsible for your belief to God alone. If you say a thing is right, simply because you want to do it, and have never taken the trouble to think about it at all, that is altogether another matter. It would be quite as sensible to turn your back upon a certain article of furniture, shut your eyes, and deny that it is there, because you cannot see it.

It is so easy to do a convenient or a pleasant thing because a great many other people whom you know do it, apparently with no compunctions. There is such a plausible argument in saying: “They are better and wiser than I ever expect to be. It would be very presumptuous in me to declare a thing wrong, that they, by word and example, affirm to be right.”

But conscience, like some possessions of lesser value, is plainly marked, “Not transferable;” therefore the responsibility of living according to your own, and not your neighbor’s, is inevitable. Many actions involve absolute, inherent right or wrong. Others are simply questions of expediency,—right for some people under some circumstances, wrong for others differently environed. Pre-eminently must the latter class be decided each one for itself. Many of them can only be dealt with by a very sensitive, highly developed conscience, one keen-eyed enough to detect very delicate moral shadings, and brave enough to face the truth, even when arrayed against some darling indulgence.

A year ago you honestly thought a certain course of action right, to which to-day, with your broader knowledge, deeper faith, and truer living, you could not commit yourself. Only by boldly challenging every such question, sifting it to the very bottom, and resolutely living up to our decisions, can we have strong, growing, educated consciences; only thus can we “come to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”—Kate Livingston Hamilton, in S. S. Times.