E. Conscience in its relation to God as law-giver.—Since conscience, in the proper sense, gives uniform and infallible judgment that the right is supremely obligatory, and that the wrong must be forborne at every cost, it can be called an echo of God's voice, and an indication in man of that which his own true being requires.
Conscience has sometimes been described as the voice of God in the soul, or as the personal presence and influence of God himself. But we must not identify conscience with God. D. W. Faunce: “Conscience is not God,—it is only a part of one's self. To build up a religion about one's own conscience, as if it were God, is only a refined selfishness—a worship of one part of one's self by another part of one's self.” In The Excursion, Wordsworth speaks of conscience as “God's most intimate presence in the soul And his most perfect image in the world.” But in his Ode to Duty he more discreetly writes: “Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove, Thou who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free And calmst the weary strife of frail humanity!” Here is an allusion to the Hebrew Bath Kol. “The Jews say that the Holy Spirit spoke during the Tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first Temple by the Prophets, and under the second Temple by the Bath Kol—a divine intimation as inferior to the oracular voice proceeding from the mercy seat as a daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother. It is also used in the sense of an approving conscience. In this case it is the echo of the voice of God in those who by obeying hear” (Hershon's Talmudic Miscellany, 2, note). This phrase, “the echo of God's voice,” is a correct description of conscience, and Wordsworth probably had it in mind when he spoke of duty as “the daughter of the voice of God.”Robert Browning describes conscience as “the great beacon-light God sets in all.... The worst man upon earth ... knows in his conscience more Of what right is, than arrives at birth In the best man's acts that we bow before.” Jackson, James Martineau, 154—The sense of obligation is “a piercing ray of the great Orb of souls.” On Wordsworth's conception of conscience, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 365-368.
Since the activity of the immanent God reveals itself in the normal operations of our own faculties, conscience might be also regarded as man's true self over against the false self which we have set up against it. Theodore Parker defines conscience as “our consciousness of the conscience of God.” In his fourth year, says Chadwick, his biographer (pages 12, 13, 185), young Theodore saw a little spotted tortoise and lifted his hand to strike. All at once something checked his arm, and a voice within said clear and loud: “It is wrong.” He asked his mother what it was that told him it was wrong. [pg 502]She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking him in her arms said: “Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and will always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and will leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on your hearing this little voice.” R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 87, 171—“Man has conscience, as he has talents. Conscience, no more than talent, makes him good. He is good, only as he follows conscience and uses talent.... The relation between the terms consciousness and conscience, which are in fact but forms of the same word, testifies to the fact that it is in the action of conscience that man's consciousness of himself is chiefly experienced.”
The conscience of the regenerate man may have such right standards, and its decisions may be followed by such uniformly right action, that its voice, though it is not itself God's voice, is yet the very echo of God's voice. The renewed conscience may take up into itself, and may express, the witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 9:1—“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Spirit”; cf. 8:16—“the Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God”). But even when conscience judges according to imperfect standards, and is imperfectly obeyed by the will, there is a spontaneity in its utterances and a sovereignty in its commands. It declares that whatever is right must be done. The imperative of conscience is a “categorical imperative” (Kant). It is independent of the human will. Even when disobeyed, it still asserts its authority. Before conscience, every other impulse and affection of man's nature is called to bow.
F. Conscience in its relation to God as holy.—Conscience is not an original authority. It points to something higher than itself. The “authority of conscience” is simply the authority of the moral law, or rather, the authority of the personal God, of whose nature the law is but a transcript. Conscience, therefore, with its continual and supreme demand that the right should be done, furnishes the best witness to man of the existence of a personal God, and of the supremacy of holiness in him in whose image we are made.
In knowing self in connection with moral law, man not only gets his best knowledge of self, but his best knowledge of that other self opposite to him, namely, God. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 236—“The conscience is the true Jacob's ladder, set in the heart of the individual and reaching unto heaven; and upon it the angels of self-reproach and self-approval ascend and descend.” This is of course true if we confine our thoughts to the mandatory element in revelation. There is a higher knowledge of God which is given only in grace. Jacob's ladder symbolizes the Christ who publishes not only the gospel but the law, and not only the law but the gospel. Dewey, Psychology, 344—“Conscience is intuitive, not in the sense that it enunciates universal laws and principles, for it lays down no laws. Conscience is a name for the experience of personality that any given act is in harmony or in discord with a truly realized personality.”Because obedience to the dictates of conscience is always relatively right, Kant could say that “an erring conscience is a chimæra.” But because the law accepted by conscience may be absolutely wrong, conscience may in its decisions greatly err from the truth. S. S. Times: “Saul before his conversion was a conscientious wrong doer. His spirit and character was commendable, while his conduct was reprehensible.” We prefer to say that Saul's zeal for the law was a zeal to make the law subservient to his own pride and honor.
Horace Bushnell said that the first requirement of a great ministry is a great conscience. He did not mean the punitive, inhibitory conscience merely, but rather the discovering, arousing, inspiring conscience, that sees at once the great things to be done, and moves toward them with a shout and a song. This unbiased and pure conscience is inseparable from the sense of its relation to God and to God's holiness. Shakespeare, Henry VI, 2d Part, 3:2—“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.” Huxley, in his lecture at Oxford in 1893, admits and even insists that ethical practice must be and should be in opposition to evolution; that the methods of evolution do not account for ethical man and his ethical progress. Morality is not a product of the same methods by which [pg 503]lower orders have advanced in perfection of organization, namely, by the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Human progress is moral, is in freedom, is under the law of love, is different in kind from physical evolution. James Russell Lowell: “In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing: The ten commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”
R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 161—“Conscience lives in human nature like a rightful king, whose claim can never be forgotten by his people, even though they dethrone and misuse him, and whose presence on the seat of judgment can alone make the nation to be at peace with itself.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 424—“The Kantian theory of autonomy does not tell the whole story of the moral life. Its unyielding Ought, its categorical Imperative, issues not merely from the depths of our own nature, but from the heart of the universe itself. We are self-legislative; but we reënact the law already enacted by God; we recognize, rather than constitute, the law of our own being. The moral law is an echo, within our own souls, of the voice of the Eternal, ‘whose offspring we are’ (Acts 17:28).”
Schenkel, Christliche Dogmatik, 1:135-155—“The conscience is the organ by which the human spirit finds God in itself and so becomes aware of itself in him. Only in conscience is man conscious of himself as eternal, as distinct from God, yet as normally bound to be determined wholly by God. When we subject ourselves wholly to God, conscience gives us peace. When we surrender to the world the allegiance due only to God, conscience brings remorse. In this latter case we become aware that while God is in us, we are no longer in God. Religion is exchanged for ethics, the relation of communion for the relation of separation. In conscience alone man distinguishes himself absolutely from the brute. Man does not make conscience, but conscience makes man. Conscience feels every separation from God as an injury to self. Faith is the relating of the self-consciousness to the God-consciousness, the becoming sure of our own personality, in the absolute personality of God. Only in faith does conscience come to itself. But by sin this faith-consciousness may be turned into law-consciousness. Faith affirms God in us; Law affirms God outside of us.” Schenkel differs from Schleiermacher in holding that religion is not feeling but conscience, and that it is not a sense of dependence on the world, but a sense of dependence on God. Conscience recognizes a God distinct from the universe, a moral God, and so makes an unmoral religion impossible.
Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283-285, Moral Science, 49, Law of Love, 41—“Conscience is the moral consciousness of man in view of his own actions as related to moral law. It is a double knowledge of self and of the law. Conscience is not the whole of the moral nature. It presupposes the moral reason, which recognizes the moral law and affirms its universal obligation for all moral beings. It is the office of conscience to bring man into personal relation to this law. It sets up a tribunal within him by which his own actions are judged. Not conscience, but the moral reason, judges of the conduct of others. This last is science, but not conscience.”