“Or Philip de Edyngdon? Perchance thou hadst not reached him.”
“Why, Father, I might never think of sitting in judgment on you. No, I was thinking of some I had wist long ago: and in especial of Dame Isabel the Queen, and other that were about her. What is it moveth folks to love one another, or to hate belike?”
“There be but three things can move thee to aught, my daughter: God, Satan, and thine own human heart.”
“And my conscience?” said I.
“Men do oftentimes set down to conscience,” saith he, “that which is either God or Satan. The enlightened conscience of the righteous man worketh as God’s Holy Spirit move him. The defiled conscience of the evil man listeneth to the promptings of Satan. And the seared conscience is as dead, and moveth not at all.”
“Father, can a man then kill his conscience?”
“He may lay it asleep for this life, daughter: may so crush it with weights thereon laid that it is as though it had the sickness of palsy, and cannot move limb. But I count, when this life is over, it shall shake off the weight, and wake up, to a life and a torment that shall never end.”
“I marvel if she did,” said I, rather to myself than him.
“Daughter,” he made answer, “whoso she be, let her be. God saith not to thee, He, and she, but I, and thou. When Christ knocketh at thy door, if thou open not, shall He take it as tideful answer that thou wert full busy watching other folks’ doors to see if they would open?”
“Yet may we not learn, Father, from other folks’ blunders?”