CHRISTIANITY AND THE CONSCIENCE.
rTO TEE ED/TOE OF VIZ " SPECTATOR-"] SIR,—You allowed me some years ago to supply an illustration, by way of analogy, which might help to " the correction of conscience." The deeply interesting article in the Spectator of February 22nd emboldens me to repeat it. Conscience has been compared by Victor Hugo (" Les Miserables," II. 3; VII. 5) to the compass of a ship. But a ship's compass is apt to be deflected from its true pole by various disturbing forces. It may become attracted to a point not in the heavens but in the earth. It requires to be corrected from time to time. So conscience is not an infallible guide. It may even mislead. It may degenerate into mere morbid scruple, which is a counterfeit of conscience, not the genuine coin.
South has remarked in one of his vigorous sermons that "no one thing in the world has done more mischief, and caused more delusions among men, than their not dis- tinguishing between conscience and mere opinion or per- suasion." Jeremy Taylor describes a doubtful conscience as "no guide of human actions but a disease." St. Paul speaks of "the spirit of a sound mind," and the Church in her Pentecostal Collect bids us pray that we may have "a right judgment in all things." Jeremy Taylor, with Hooker and other judicious divines, traces the genesis of a morbid conscience to indisposition of body or of mind. It may some- times be due to a physical cause, and by physical means may be corrected. With real or renewed health or growth, physical and mental, these parasites which prey upon us will disappear.
The whole subject of morbid impulses, their origin and treatment, seems to demand more attention from divines than it has yet received. Impressionable young persons, those especially who are brought up under systems which cultivate chiefly the subjective side of religion, and given to morbid intro- spection, suffer much, and make others suffer, from what is really a distempered state of mind. There are of course the standard treatises of Bishop Sanderson and others, and Jeremy Taylor's "Ductor Dubitantium" is a mine of curious information on the subject; but there seems need of more guidance, especially in the present state of suspense in men's minds with regard to the authority of Scripture and of the Church. It would be impossible within the limits of a letter to do more than to refer to those questions of casuistry which Molina, Escobar, Liguori, and others formulated into a system, which Pascal in his " Lettres Provinciales " exposed with an unrivalled irony. I should like, however, to call attention to a remarkable fragment by Archbishop Leighton on " The Rule of Conscience." He notes that the name imports "a knowing together with another." The act of knowledge is science, the reflex act is conscience. The treatise seems to have been extorted by the favourite plea of the Puritanical party. He dryly observes: "Many times men walk according to conscience, when they are walking quite contrary to Scripture."
At the outset of Christ's teaching we are supplied with a fruitful illustration. " The eye is the lamp of the body." A very little, we know, will derange the eye. An insect, a grain of sand, a ray of light stronger than it will bear, exposure to excessive cold or beat, want of cleanliness,—any of these may not only distress it for a time, but damage it altogether. Let it be ever so slightly deranged, it is no longer an exact con- ductor of light, a channel of perception and knowledge and comfort. Hence arise those expressions, a distorted view of things, seeing double ; which sometimes becomes the case when this organ is vitiated by disease or by excess, and is literally the opposite to that "single" eye of which Christ speaks.
Conscience, like the eye, may become deranged. Or, to employ another illustration, excellent as may be the chronometer of conscience, and from the hand of the highest artificer, it is liable to error. It has somehow got out of order. It has been attracted by the earth. It has need of the sun, something direct from heaven, to test it and to set it from time to time. "The light that led astray," for all the impulsive Scottish poet says to the contrary, was not "light from heaven."
It was said, I think unfairly, of a famous statesman that his conscience became his accomplice. Archbishop Wbately, however, puts the general case fairly enough when he says that a man may be said to follow his conscience as a man in a gig may be said to follow his horse, by driving it before him.
It is not always a conscious self-deception. The bowl has its bias, which sends it further on the wrong road than it otherwise might have gone. " Jamais on ne fait le mal si pleinement et si gaiement, que quand on le fait par un faux principe de conscience " (Pascal, " Pensees," chap. 28). A man strains out gnats while be is incontinently swallowing camels. The Jews scrupled to enter the Court of a heathen Judge while compassing an act from which that heathen recoiled. Even now we hear of Greek and Italian brigands who scruple to eat flesh on fasting-days, but have no hesitation in taking human life. Whether Henry VIII. was actuated by any genuine scruple in seeking a divorce from Katharine of Aragon is not for me to determine, but we may recall that scene in Shakespeare where the Lord Chamberlain says,— " It seems the marriage with his brother's wife Has crept too near his conscience" ; and Suffolk answers,— "Hissonscience Has crept too near another lady."
The attempts of the modern materialist to discover a mere physical basis of conscience must prove a failure. It is a fact in Nature that we have a moral sense, however we come by it. Man alone of animals, as Aristotle (" Politics," I. i. 11) observed, has within him a feeling of right and wrong.
You speak, Sir, of common-sense as an instrument for the correction of conscience. I will conclude with J. R. Lowell's common-sense way of putting it :—
"In vain we call old notions fudge,
And bend our conscience by our dealing ; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing."
Scottish Conservative Club, Edinburgh.
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