Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203, 270—“All men have a sense of right,—of right to life, and contemporaneously perhaps, but certainly afterwards, of right to personal property. And my right implies duty in my neighbor to respect it. Then the sense of right becomes objective and impersonal. My neighbor's duty to me implies my duty to him. I put myself in his place.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 156, 188—“First, the feeling of obligation, the idea of a right and a wrong with corresponding duties, is universal.... Secondly, there is a very general agreement in the formal principles of action, and largely in the virtues also, such as benevolence, justice, gratitude.... Whether we owe anything to our neighbor has never been a real question. The practical trouble has always lain in the other question: Who is my neighbor? Thirdly, the specific contents of the moral ideal are not fixed, but the direction in which the ideal lies is generally discernible.... We have in ethics the same fact as in intellect—a potentially infallible standard, with manifold errors in its apprehension and application. Lucretius held that degradation and paralysis of the moral nature result from religion. Many claim on the other hand that without religion morals would disappear from the earth.”
Robinson, Princ. and Prac. of Morality, 173—“Fear of an omnipotent will is very different from remorse in view of the nature of the supreme Being whose law we have violated.” A duty is to be settled in accordance with the standard of absolute right, not as public sentiment would dictate. A man must be ready to do right in spite of what everybody thinks. Just as the decisions of a judge are for the time binding on all good citizens, so the decisions of conscience, as relatively binding, must always be obeyed. They are presumptively right and they are the only present guide of action. Yet man's present state of sin makes it quite possible that the decisions which are relatively [pg 500]right may be absolutely wrong. It is not enough to take one's time from the watch; the watch may go wrong; there is a prior duty of regulating the watch by astronomical standards. Bishop Gore: “Man's first duty is, not to follow his conscience, but to enlighten his conscience.” Lowell says that the Scythians used to eat their grandfathers out of humanity. Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300—“Nothing is so stubborn or so fanatical as a wrongly instructed conscience, as Paul showed in his own case by his own confession” (Acts 26:9—“I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth”).
D. Conscience the moral judiciary of the soul.—From what has been previously said, it is evident that only 3. and 4. are properly included under the term conscience. Conscience is the moral judiciary of the soul—the power within of judgment and command. Conscience must judge according to the law given to it, and therefore, since the moral standard accepted by the reason may be imperfect, its decisions, while relatively just, may be absolutely unjust.—1. and 2. belong to the moral reason, but not to conscience proper. Hence the duty of enlightening and cultivating the moral reason, so that conscience may have a proper standard of judgment.—5. and 6. belong to the sphere of moral sentiment, and not to conscience proper. The office of conscience is to “bear witness” (Rom. 2:15).
In Rom. 2:15—“they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them”—we have conscience clearly distinguished both from the law and the perception of law on the one hand, and from the moral sentiments of approbation and disapprobation on the other. Conscience does not furnish the law, but it bears witness with the law which is furnished by other sources. It is not “that power of mind by which moral law is discovered to each individual”(Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 77), nor can we speak of “Conscience, the Law” (as Whewell does in his Elements of Morality, 1:259-266). Conscience is not the law-book, in the court room, but it is the judge,—whose business is, not to make law, but to decide cases according to the law given to him.
As conscience is not legislative, so it is not retributive; as it is not the law-book, so it is not the sheriff. We say, indeed, in popular language, that conscience scourges or chastises, but it is only in the sense in which we say that the judge punishes,—i. e., through the sheriff. The moral sentiments are the sheriff,—they carry out the decisions of conscience, the judge; but they are not themselves conscience, any more than the sheriff is the judge.
Only this doctrine, that conscience does not discover law, can explain on the one hand the fact that men are bound to follow their consciences, and on the other hand the fact that their consciences so greatly differ as to what is right or wrong in particular cases. The truth is, that conscience is uniform and infallible, in the sense that it always decides rightly according to the law given it. Men's decisions vary, only because the moral reason has presented to the conscience different standards by which to judge.
Conscience can be educated only in the sense of acquiring greater facility and quickness in making its decisions. Education has its chief effect, not upon the conscience, but upon the moral reason, in rectifying its erroneous, or imperfect standards of judgment. Give conscience a right law by which to judge, and its decisions will be uniform, and absolutely as well as relatively just. We are bound, not only to “follow our conscience,”but to have a right conscience to follow,—and to follow it, not as one follows the beast he drives, but as the soldier follows his commander. Robert J. Burdette: “Following conscience as a guide is like following one's nose. It is important to get the nose pointed right before it is safe to follow it. A man can keep the approval of his own conscience in very much the same way that he can keep directly behind his nose, and go wrong all the time.”
Conscience is the con-knowing of a particular act or state, as coming under the law accepted by the reason as to right and wrong; and the judgment of conscience subsumes this act or state under that general standard. Conscience cannot include the law—cannot itself be the law,—because reason only knows, never con-knows. Reason says scio; only judgment says conscio.
This view enables us to reconcile the intuitional and the empirical theories of morals. Each has its element of truth. The original sense of right and wrong is intuitive,—no education could ever impart the idea of the difference between right and wrong to one who had it not. But what classes of things are right or wrong, we learn by the exercise of our logical intelligence, in connection with experiences of utility, influences of society and tradition, and positive divine revelation. Thus our moral reason, through a combination of intuition and education, of internal and external information as to general principles of right and wrong, furnishes the standard according to which conscience may judge the particular cases which come before it.
This moral reason may become depraved by sin, so that the light becomes darkness (Mat. 6:22, 23) and conscience has only a perverse standard by which to judge. The “weak” conscience (1 Cor. 8:12) is one whose standard of judgment is yet imperfect; the conscience “branded” (Rev. Vers.) or “seared” (A. V.) “as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2) is one whose standard has been wholly perverted by practical disobedience. The word and the Spirit of God are the chief agencies in rectifying our standards of judgment, and so of enabling conscience to make absolutely right decisions. God can so unite the soul to Christ, that it becomes partaker on the one hand of his satisfaction to justice and is thus “sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22), and on the other hand of his sanctifying power and is thus enabled in certain respects to obey God's command and to speak of a “good conscience” (1 Pet. 3:16—of single act; 3:21—of state) instead of an “evil conscience”(Heb. 10:22) or a conscience “defiled” (Tit. 1:15) by sin. Here the “good conscience” is the conscience which has been obeyed by the will, and the “evil conscience” the conscience which has been disobeyed; with the result, in the first case, of approval from the moral sentiments, and, in the second case, of disapproval.