286 THE REV. H. J. CLARKE ON 
illustration, for history suggests to me no incident at once 
more apposite and pointed—I would instance that inglorious 
mental struggle which resulted in the feebly resolute command 
that John the Baptist should be put to death. “The King was 
grieved ; but for the sake of his oath, and of them which sat 
at meat with him,” (Matt. xiv, 9), he gave the order. His 
habitual and prevailing sense of duty, 1t would seem, was of 
that kind which can apprehend no obligations but such as 
have their ground in custom, fashion, and tradition. He had 
so neglected the Divine demand for purity and truthfulness in 
all the workings of his mind, as to be only fitfully, and not at 
any time effectually, susceptible of ethical impressions, save 
as a child of this world. The proverb which asserts that even 
thieves are wont to recognize among themselves some code 
of honour, broadly resting as it does, on facts, bears no 
uncertain witness to the possible existence of a sense of duty 
quite divorced from conscientiousness, or, after the extinction 
of the latter, still in some ways active. 
The late Professor Maurice, in an allusion he has made 
to Tennyson’s Northern Farmer, in his profoundly thought- 
ful and instructive treatise on the Conscience, * shuws, I 
think, a misconception of the significance of certain words of 
moral import, relatively to the character portrayed. Accord- 
ing to his view, apparently, however low may be the notions 
which the man has formed regarding duty, his fundamental 
apprehension of it presupposes that he has in him at least 
the germ of conscientiousness, a motive principle of noble 
nature, and requiring only due development and culture. 
Now there needs no proof that any one who thinks he has a 
duty knows with himself the thought. Thus far, undoubtedly, 
the Northern Farmer manifests a conscience. What it 
indicates to me, however, is a sense of fitness which respects 
custom and prescriptive right, acquiesces in the inevitable, 
and in the retrospect of an ungodly and immoral life enjoys 
a sort of satisfaction which is unalloyed by any consciousness 
of being guilty, any sense of shame at all. ‘The coarsely 
heathenish traits of character which, under the conditions 
imagined, are compatible with this inferior, this psychic 
sense of duty, have been depicted by the poet with consum- 
mate skill, and, in exhibiting it undiluted with the faintest 
signs of penitence, or of religious aspiration, they show us 
the more distinctly what it really is. And yet there are 
conditions under which it may be found alone without 
* Lectures on Casurstry, Lect. 1, p. 35. 
