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THEODORE ROBERTS, ESQ., ON 



So far as I understand it, conscience, quite as much as reason, 

 differentiates man from the rest of the creatures on this planet. 

 But conscience is superior to reason in that reason is not neces- 

 sarily amenable to moral considerations, as witness the great 

 minds of Julius Caesar and Napoleon, men wholly immoral, using 

 that word in the widest and truest sense. Conscience is spoken 

 of by St. Paul in his great treatise entitled " The Epistle to the 

 Romans '* as that which within man bears witness to him of good 

 and evil and leads to self-accusation or self-excuse (Chap. ii. 15), 

 but it does not appear in the early ages of the history of mankind 

 to have had any place given it by the philosophers. 



Even the famous incident of the unjust condemnation and 

 death of Socrates, the most attractive of all the ancient philoso- 

 phers, is very far from being a question of conscience. All that 

 Mr. Benn in his recent work on the Greek Philosophers (p. 137) 

 can say is: — " Here, in this one cause, the real central issue 

 between two abstract principles, the principle of authority and the 

 principle of reason, was cleared from all adventitious circum- 

 stances, and disputed on its own intrinsic merits with the usual 

 weapons of argument on the one side and brute force on the 

 other." 



Conscience necessarily brings in the thought of responsibility 

 to God, and, therefore, it has been well said that while man's 

 reason may be infidel, his conscience never is. By conscience, 

 accordingly, I understand that intuition or voice within us which 

 judges our actions and thoughts (and by inference the actions and 

 words of others) as morally good or morally bad. As Wordsworth 

 puts it — 



Conscience reverenced and obeyed. 



As God's most intimate presence in the soul." 



For conscience, therefore, to come into opposition to power 

 it is plain that that power must be itself morally bad and opposed 

 to God. I use the word " power " rather than " authority," 

 because, strictly speaking, the only true authority is that of Uod. 

 and consequently cannot come into opposition with conscience. I 

 do not Umit power to what is physical, but include in the teiTQ the 

 force of established customs and public opinion. 



We may say that so long as God's ancient people Israel were 

 maintained in any kind of outward relationship to Him, conscience 

 and power could not, strictly speaking, come into contest at all, and 

 this was definitely taught by the Jewish law, for the man who kept 

 it was to prosper in everything. 



The contrast between that dispensation and the Christian dis- 

 pensation is summed up by the great Bacon in his sentence that 

 ' ' Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament ; adversity is the 

 blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction." 



