Conscience and Responsibility.
EVERY possession a man holds, he holds under obligations. Every power he exercises, he exercises under penalties. We recognize this, at least we say we do, in connection with property, place, influence, or even abilities. But it is just as true in certain other matters in which we do not often recognize it. Judgment, conscience, reason—all are possessed and exercised under penalties also. We often find men representing conscience, for instance, as their absolute master. They are, they seem to think, entirely irresponsible if they claim only to act under control of conscience. Whether they go right or wrong, they seem to hold themselves excused if only they go according to conscience. Now the truth is, a man possesses a conscience as he possesses any other gift—as a trust. He is responsible for his possession and its use. He is under penalties to preserve it rightly and use it rightly. If he abuse his conscience, or misuse it, so that it points no longer the right road, so he cannot trust it, he is in the same position with the man who has so abused his eyes that he cannot trust them. In either case, if a man is misled to his injury or ruin, it is small comfort to him to be able to say he followed either his own conscience or his own eyes, to the one or the other. It is time that this view of the relation of conscience were dwelt upon more plainly, and insisted upon more rigidly. We have so exaggerated in our discussions about conscience, that men have made it a tyrant, an absolute autocrat from which there can be no appeal, have even set it on the throne of God! The fact is that it does not make right. It only declares it. It does not make wrong. It only declares and forbids it. It does not create the law. It only judges about the law. And it may be poor, weak, ignorant, stupid, and miserable—a wretched, half-dead, besotted conscience! Let a man look to himself. His conscience is a solemn responsibility. It is given him to teach, and strengthen, and educate. He is bound under solemn bonds for its treatment and its use. To say of anything—"my conscience led me to think it right," is not to answer the last question. It remains still to demand, "How came you to have such a conscience? What business have you, with your advantages and your opportunities, to harbor a conscience so besotted and purblind that it cannot see the road, or cannot point it?"—Churchman. THE darkest clouds that shadow our paths are not the vapors that rise from the earth, but the thoughts and memories of an unhappy and sinful heart. It is a dreary sensation to find one's self wholly forgotten by mere acquaintances; but to find that we have no place in the thoughts of those we love, seems in a certain sense like being annihilated.