THE CONSCIENCE. 



151 



may repeat the similar error, previously, and again since, commit- 

 ted by the State. But still it remains true that the recognition 

 of a double allegiance by a citizen who is also a Christian 

 Churchman is a peruianent testimony to the impossibility that 

 membership in any finite and visible organized community can 

 be the completely adequate expression of the infinity of the 

 human spirit. 



Yet this is not to say that the individual as such can escape 

 into a realm of merely individual duty, which is not in any 

 sense social. The expression " private conscience " may well 

 prove misleading. Probably it was first used to mean the 

 conscience of what it was right to do as a private person as 

 distinc^uished from the conscience of what it was rig;ht to do as a 

 person acting in a public capacity. But the phrase is sometimes 

 used very carelessly ; and it comes to be taken almost as though 

 it belonged to the essence of Conscience to be private. 



Now, as was said in an earlier part of this paper, Conscience, to 

 be Conscience at all, must indeed be one's own. But " private," 

 in a strict sense, it could not be without abandoning all claim 

 to rationality ; for Eeason can never be private. It is essentially 

 what we share with all rational beings ; it is essentially that 

 in us which apprehends what is objectively real, independently 

 of the peculiarities belonging to our apprehension of it. To think 

 of the Conscience as " private "is to represent it, not so much in 

 the light of a kind of reason as in the light of a kind of sense ; 

 and many would see no harm in this. But even my senses I 

 distrust if they disagree with other people's ; that is, I distrust 

 their report of the real world. Our perceptions must indeed be 

 our own ; and, as we saw before, so must our rational apprehen- 

 sions also. But they need not be, and, on the whole, we prefer 

 them not to be, peculiar. It is the madman who of all men lives 

 most in a world of his own ; the genius, on the other hand, is he 

 who gives the touch of a common nature which " makes the whole 

 world kin." So, insistence on the privacy of Conscience in 

 morals may lead to mere individual taste or passion masquerad- 

 ing under the name of "private conscience." There is indeed 

 always a moral danger in the cultivation of moral dissent for 

 dissent's sake. The great reformers have usually appealed to 

 the tradition of the society in which they appear. " If ye had 

 believed Moses, ye would have believed Me." They claim to be 

 faithful to the principles which all acknowledge — more faithful 

 than their neighbours. They have indeed often appealed to the 

 tradition of the society in a way that is unhistorical, represent- 

 ing what they recommend as having actually occurred in a 



