Proverbs 20:27

The Scriptural Doctrine of Conscience

Pro 20:27

What is the Scripture doctrine of conscience? The Bible is before us; let us look at it, simply as a record, and inquire what is its particular doctrine on conscience. Does it recognise conscience at all? Does it concern itself about conscience? Does it ever become very earnest about conscience? Is the matter treated incidentally, in a measure casually and offhandedly, or remotely referred to? or does it constitute what may be called a principal line in the record? Observe, we treat the Bible in this initial argument simply as a document. We do not ask who wrote it, where it came from, by whose authority it speaks; we simply want to know, in the first instance, what the Bible says in reference to this great and anxious question of the human conscience.

It cannot be denied that from beginning to end the Bible recognises the fact that man has a conscience. I am not aware that the Bible says, There is a God; or that the Bible begins human history by saying, There is a conscience: in both respects it would seem that a great assumption is made. The very first sentence in the Bible is the greatest sentence in all literature. There Is nothing else that can cover it wholly for pregnancy, suggestiveness, comprehensiveness, sublimity; and so certain words were spoken to man which could not have been spoken to him except under certain assumptions and conditions. It is better that it is so. There would have been, perhaps, a more dignified formality in a specific sentence to the effect, There is a God: there is a conscience: there is a heaven; but the Bible, by whomsoever inspired or incited, makes great assumptions, starts upon certain conditions and propositions, and works its way from these, and so works its way as to justify the reasonableness and truthfulness of the assumptions upon which its mystery, argument, and exhortation are founded. Does a child come into the world with a conscience? That might be turned into a metaphysical inquiry, and might occasion the human mind great trouble as to analysis and specific statement. But there is a practical way of dealing even with an inquiry so profound. Does a child come into the world with responsibility, judgment, imagination, faculty of any kind? Verily appearances are against it. Looking fairly upon a child, without prejudice, appearances go heavily against it as to its being a responsible creature, as to its having any poetic fire, moral sense, spiritual faculty, or destiny beyond the little day in which its body breathes. But can we limit the argument to the area of appearances? Must we not go further? Must we not interpret one life by another? We have not to deal with a solitary or isolated infant, and get up a large amount of wonder about it, conjecturing whatever can it be, wherever has it come from, to what end can it be moving? Human history is now old enough to fall back upon itself, with certain lights and explanations. Therefore I do not see that language would be outraged, or reason put to any extremity, if we said, The child belongs to the human family; being a member of the human family, it must possess certain instincts, germs of reason, certain hints of faculty, certain suggestions of possibility: at present they amount to next to nothing; if you had to set them all down on paper by a separate estimate, and in easily-added figures, you would not have much to do in an arithmetical way. No doubt appearances are so far against the child. But human history is all in its favour. Who will believe that the child is dumb? When all the world has given the child up as dumb, the mother will still expect to hear some little articulation, and she will be quite sure she has heard it. So who will say the child has no conscience? give it time. No understanding? give it time: let it be developed. God has never spoken to lion or eagle, to whale, or largest, finest beast of the forest, as he has spoken to man. Every speech made to man has assumed that man could answer. "There is a spirit in man" a ghost, another, truer self than is seen by the eye. You can find an oak in an acorn: no man ever found an oak in a paving-stone. We must, therefore, look into the plasm, that very first hint of life and purpose and issue; and so looking I, for one, cannot see, let me repeat, that language would be outraged if we said, standing over a little child, This child has judgment, sense, moral faculty, spiritual power, all in germ, all undeveloped, all unawakened; but give time, bring the right ministries to bear upon the child, and then the issue will show how the child is constituted.

The Bible proceeds upon the assumption that man has what may be called a conscience, a moral sense, a faculty that can in some measure understand, worship, and serve God. I am not aware that there is any hint in the Bible that would serve as a proof that this moral sense is the gift of society or of law. It would seem to precede all society, and to be its beginning and extension; it would seem to lie deeper than all law, and to give law whatever real value it possesses. Society does not give a man imagination, or talent, or genius, or high faculty; it may sharpen all these, create opportunities for the exercise of all these, but the gift is within, the secret of God is in the heart, some sign, token, pulse, throb, call it by what name we may something in the man that says, I was made to keep society with God. One man says, I can think, therefore I am. Another might add, I can pray, and therefore I am spiritual, almost divine. It cannot but be interesting to find in ourselves not round about ourselves, like so many decorations and investitures made by society certain elements, pulsations, aspirations, which attest that we are better than the best beast, that between us and the greatest of the unintelligent creation there lies the diameter of an unmeasured universe. It seems to me, therefore, on reading the Bible through, that everywhere the existence of conscience is assumed, not as having been created by society or law, but as being in man, part of man without which, indeed, he could not be man in the truest and highest sense of that complex term.

The Bible further declares that the conscience or moral sense may be trained upward or downward, may be sanctified or corrupted, strengthened or weakened. Conscience does not stand apart, taking no interest in the fray of life; it is in some sense the most active and energetic of all the ministries of our nature, and it cannot escape the general atmosphere in which we live. Even conscience may be desecrated; the choicest golden vessels of the temple may be stolen and may be carried away to the tents of the Philistines. Paul says, "Herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men;" "Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience." There is a history of adjectives. There is a moral history and a natural history of epithets. Who could imagine that "good" would have come and set itself against "conscience," to explain it and to help it? Who would gild refined gold? Is not this painting the lily that a word like "good" should attach itself to conscience? Is not this a despicable patronage? Does "conscience" want adjectival commendation or exposition? Is not the very word itself a star to which nothing can be added by way of completing its magnitude or increasing its radiance? You will find in answer to this inquiry that many epithets or explanatory words have been attached to the high term conscience to show what was meant in particular relations and conditions and at special times. The natural history of words finds a copious and instructive chapter at this point. Conscience is not necessarily good, but it may be trained to goodness. I have so read the Bible as to believe that the Bible will never allow there can be a good conscience towards man until there is first a good conscience towards God. Am I right in my reading? I am not using the word in any secondary sense, as socially tolerable, decent, useful; but good in its own true sense all pure, without flaw, sincere, transparent, profound goodness. The Bible always insists that there must be first a right relation to God before there can be a right relation to man. Thus the Bible is unlike any other book. It will not be content with secondaries, except as recognising them as such, saying, You are secondary, you are but reformers, you are helps, but what you must be at and get at is a right relation towards God. In no official or institutional sense, but in the profoundest sense, a man must be religious before he can be philanthropic. Man cannot understand man's value until he has held communion with God. May we not justify this by Christ's words? "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets," namely: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself." The process cannot be reversed or inverted. Attempts may be made in that direction, but how much do those very attempts owe to high religious and Christian education in the first instance? To love your neighbour is impossible, in Christ's sense of the term, until you have first loved God. The religious love brings with it all the '"acuity and fervour of the soul, makes the soul realise itself, and then sends it back into the world, solemn with reverence, tender with pity, hopeful with God's own love, sacrificial as in sympathy with the very Cross of Christ. Meanwhile, observe how we stand. We are not asking, Is all this true or not true? We are simply endeavouring to find the doctrine of a particular book on a particular subject; and the contention is that Jesus Christ would never allow the possibility of neighbourly love, in its highest, deepest, and fullest sense, except as sequential upon true, honest, deep, sacrificial love of God. What applies to love would seem to apply at least to conscience. "Herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men." Life is not a trick, a social arrangement, a series of attitudes, or exchanges of courtesies; social life itself is a great religious mystery when properly treated, and can only be handled effectually and beneficently by men who have been closeted with God in long solitude, in the solitude of a dual companionship an irony and a contradiction in words, but easily reconciled by the soul who has spent much time with the Father. If this be at all true, it is simply vain for any man to attempt to have a good social conscience without his first having an honest religious conscience. Not that he may not be intermediately and secondarily very good, most useful, reliable in many respects, calculated to bear a certain amount of pressure with mathematical exactness; but the man who can endure all things, and can bear all sorrow, is the man who has been with God and learned of Jesus Christ; then no mathematician can calculate the amount of pressure which he can bear; then the mathematicians do not gather around the pillars of his life, and say, By so much may the rivers run without injuring the pedestal on which he stands; they fall back and say, This is an equation that has never fallen within our mathematical reasoning; the man must be explained by God; he is right in the sanctuary, he has been weighed in the heavenly places, his heart is ideally, and by the law of aspiration at least, right with God; therefore he comes down and handles the affairs of life with a mastery and a beneficence impossible to any man who has not connected himself with the living fountain, the unseen and eternal spring. A poor, shifty, thriftless life, a surface pool, a little thing that the sunbeam can dry up, is that life that does not come up out of the Rock of Ages or flow down from the fountains of eternity. We live and move and have our being in God: otherwise we are plucked flowers, or artificial creations, and our destiny is to die.

Thus far and in this way have I read the Bible. So strong is the apostolic conviction upon this point that the apostle will insist upon the conscience itself being brought under what may be called evangelical conditions and discipline. Says he, "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" "Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience." So then he would treat life as being wrong at its very centre and spring; whether by personal conduct, whether by some mysterious action of the law of heredity, however it is, the apostles all concur in saying, The work must be done within, and all reforms that are to be complete and lasting must be interior reforms and must work out towards the exterior, carrying life, health, and beauty with them. Except the heart be clean the life cannot be pure; except the conscience adjust itself by the meridian of eternity it cannot tell to life what time it is, what duty is, and how duty is to be done. The apostle is, therefore, by so much argumentatively clear; he will not hold any dispute with us, or any conference that implies acquiescence and friendliness, unless we yield at once to the doctrine that we must be born again, we must pass through a regenerative process. Name it as you please, attach what verbal definition you may to the mere way of saying it, there must, according to apostolic doctrine, be a great mystery of re-birth accomplished in the soul, heart, spirit, conscience, before the hands can be clean, or may put themselves lawfully forward to serve the altar of heaven.

But the conscience, on the other hand, may be corrupted, ill-used, slain. I have referred to the use of certain qualifying terms. Take another "Having their conscience seared with a hot iron," having the pith taken out of it the life, the fibre, the vitality, the meaning; having a conscience like a withered leaf, like a piece of burning wood; everything taken out of it that was divinely created, with voices and ministries meant to inspire and direct, control and ennoble, the whole life. Take another qualifying term "Even their mind and conscience is defiled": the wreck is within, the ruin is spiritual, the tremendous collapse whatever the theologians may choose to name it has taken place within the man; his are no flesh-wounds, no cutaneous diseases; there is something the matter with him that cannot be touched by earthly physicians, or by invention or ingenuity of his own. The Bible says that all redeeming help must come from the creating God. This doctrine is applied to the conscience as well as to the soul in its more general and comprehensive definitions.

Then the conscience may not only be corrupted, seared, defiled, but it may be turned into a pedant and be forced to ridiculous uses. "If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" The conscience may be made to do servile work, to patronise bad things. The conscience may be appointed managing-director of the most accursed confederacies ever invented by the depravity of man. Conscience, therefore, requires continual culture, watching, assistance; it must for ever draw its vitality from the God of righteousness.

Now we must in the uses of conscience distinguish between the eternal right and the secondary right. The word "right" requires continual definition. It does not always stand for the same thing. Like the term "law," in the apostolic reasoning, it must be distinguished in its uses, and only by an analytical discrimination can it be saved from perversions the most disastrous. But how are we to ascertain the eternal right? There should be no difficulty about that. How are we to ascertain the institutional or secondary right? There ought to be no difficulty about that. Let us see whether we can render one another any little assistance in that direction. I should say that rest is the eternal right: that the time when it should be taken is the institutional right. Never must we trifle with the eternal right of every human being to rest. As to whether it shall be on the first day, or on the last, or in the middle of the week, there you touch what is secondary and institutional; there you may have change, modification to your heart's content; there indeed you may enjoy fullest liberty: but you have no liberty in the matter of treating the rest itself. One man esteemeth one day, another man esteemeth another day: let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind; but let no man lay wicked or violent hands upon the divine gift and ordinance of rest to every human creature.

Faith I should declare to be the eternal quantity that mysterious life which may be called the faith-life, the living out of oneself, the tender dependence, the filial expectation, the assured relationship to God; that is the eternal quantity: but creed, catechism, church, institution, organisation, these are secondary and intermediate, and there what liberty is offered by the very genius of the Bible! How the Apostle Paul gives lavishly of this gift of liberty, about eating, and washing, and fasting, and observance, and ceremony! He says: Be kind to one another; make allowances for one another: we cannot all think alike upon these matters; but no man must interfere with the central and eternal quantity of faith, larger than any creed, larger than any church. The creed is temporary. It may have been up to date the very best thing that could be written. But no creed can be permanent unless it be inspired. And when did God inspire a creed-maker? If we claim inspiration for the miscellaneous Bible, the multitudinous Bible, the unmethodised, unsystematised, yet coherent and harmonious Bible, we must not be claiming it too lavishly for mechanisms, formulas, human inventions. Change the creed as civilisation changes; readjust your terms as education advances; re-set all your theological positions and dogmas if you please: but you must not interfere with the eternal quantity, Faith that upper soul, that deeper life, that truer-self; that marvellous system of tentacles that hooks on to the Eternal Life call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord. You must not take away the idolater's faith when you take away his idol. Even the idolater may know the mystery of self-translation, and may have no explanation of the mystery which makes his spiritual life august and grand. Do not destroy his idol even until you can substitute it with the living God. Destruction may be carried too far, unless you are prepared with the work of construction, which ought to go on almost concurrently with the destructive process.

I should say that worship is the eternal right, but that methods of worship are the secondary right. Worship with a written formula, if you so please, and can realise most profitably, and God bless you in the exercise and use of a noble, all but inspired liturgy; if you can worship God better by free, spontaneous, unprepared addresses to the throne of the heavenly grace, by all means approach your Father along the broadest, amplest, most hospitable way: but you must never interfere with the right of worship. You can address yourselves wisely to methods, operations, systems, plans, mechanisms, all these may undergo continual change; you may change your form of worship every day in the week: but the worship itself abides, the eternal quantity.

Take a simple illustration which even a child can understand. Suppose we appoint that worship should begin at eleven o'clock in the morning. There you have two rights. There is nothing in the eleven o'clock; that is a point agreed upon, partly by compromise, partly by study of the situation, partly by cognisance of special circumstances in the city, in the parish: but it is right we should be there at eleven o'clock, because we have agreed upon it. What is the eternal right? Punctuality. No man must interfere with that He is a thief who palters with that. Punctuality is the eternal quantity, the eternal right; the eleven o'clock is but the point at which that right takes visible effect, or embodies itself in concrete realisation. But punctuality abides. You may change the eleven o'clock, you may change your time of meeting every Sabbath in the year, but having changed it you cannot interfere with the spirit of punctuality. There is a substance; there is also a shadow: there is the eternal right; there is the secondary accommodation.

But let us beware how we make a pedant of conscience, how we expend our strength on punctilios when we ought to spend it upon principle, real things. Never have a conscience that is not founded upon reason. In so far as conscience can vindicate itself by reason it will make headway in society. Reason always triumphs. It has a long weary fight, a destructive struggle sometimes, but it comes up at the last, and sits by right upon the throne, judging all men. Do not judge another man's conscience by your own on all these secondary matters. In proportion as you are addicted and here we come back to the central principle in love and loyalty to the eternal right will you be large and liberal in the uses of the secondary right. Find a man who is punctilious about little things, about details, about passing matters, and you find a man who has never been in the sanctuary of the inner right. Find a man who has communed with God, drunk the very spirit of Christ, become imbued with the very meaning of the gospel, and he, Paul-like, gives great liberty, looks with magnanimous complacency even upon the controversies of the Church, asking only that they shall be conducted gently, quietly, lovingly, and that a good deal of allowance should be made by one man for the peculiarities of another. When did Paul a Pharisee of the Pharisees learn this lesson? To what school did he repair to study this philosophy? The man who said this, who gave this liberty, also said, "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." Out of such lofty tabernacles he came to distribute amongst men rights and franchises and opportunities and privileges with the lavish hand of a princely donor. But about this conscience in the house, and in business. You may be killing your children with your conscience, because it may be an irrational conscience. Children will have amusement. You never can put down drama and dancing and recreation and jubilance; you never can cut off the foam and efflorescence and blossoming of life without doing great injury; and in attempting to do all this you may defeat yourself. That child of yours, whom you have oppressed with your conscience because you will not allow certain recreations, comes quietly in every night after having been enjoying them, and looks at you in the face with a blankness which you would understand if you were not so conscientiously stupid. Why not make your home the great joy of life, saying, Boys and girls, let us all do here what we can to alleviate life's burdens and life's darkness, and let us all be children together, so far as we may: do nothing behind me you would not do before me, and if I can join you I will, and the old man shall be as young as any of you? Then home will be church, and church will be almost heaven. Beware of the perverted conscience, the soured conscience, the right that is only secondary being put in place of the right that is primary and eternal. How is all this to be learned? Only by communion with Christ. Blessed Christ, Son of God! what liberty he gives; he said, If you like to wash your hands, well; if you prefer not to do so because the ceremony is unmeaning and fruitless, then sit down and enjoy the hospitality of the house. The Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath. When men rebuked him because he went to eat with publicans and sinners, He said, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." When they said, "This man eateth with sinners," he did not disdain the sneer; he took it as the highest eulogium that could be pronounced upon him by such lips. But let us beware lest we enjoy the secondary liberty without sustaining the primary relation. Do not play with sacred things. Be right at both ends. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself:" "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Do not live an empty, superficial, linear life, but live a full, solid, cubic, square, all-round life the very life of God. If any man says, "Such a life would I live," all God's angels will take up their abode with him; yea, the Spirit of God will be his instructor, and sanctifier, and loving friend.