The saying is true, however awful: He who rejects or dispels the plain meaning of the Bible, rejects our God, and is an idolater; and God alone can give bound to his wicked conceptions.
The foregoing extracts show us a specimen of the arguments and conclusions emanating from the doctrine that the conscience is a distinct mental power, and that it infallibly teaches what is right before God. We deem it quite objectionable—quite erroneous!
We present the proposition: The judgment is as singly employed in the decision of what is right and wrong, as it is in the conclusion that all the parts of a thing constitute the whole of it. True, the judgment, when in the exercise of determining what is right and wrong in regard to our own acts, has been named conscience. But it remains for that class of philosophers, who argue that man possesses a faculty of clairvoyance, to establish that man has also a sister faculty, which they call conscience, or moral sense; and that it exists as an independent mental power, distinct from judgment.
Most men live without reflection. They think of nothing but the objects of sense, of pressing want, and the means of relief. The wonderful works of nature create no wonder. A mine of sea-shells on the Andes excites no surprise. Of the analogies or dissimilarities between things, or their essential relations, the mind takes no notice. Even their intellectual powers exist almost without their cognisance. Their mental faculties are little improved or cultivated; and, as they are forced to the Gazetteer for the description of some distant locality, so they would be to their logic, before they could speak of their own mental functions.
The teaching of this doctrine, untrue as it is, may, therefore, be very harmful; as ill-informed individuals often form a very erroneous judgment about right and wrong, and, under the influence of its teachings, may come to think and believe that their conclusion concerning right and wrong is the product of their infallible guide, the conscience, or moral sense, and therefore past all doubt and beyond question; that their minds are under the influence and control of a new and spiritually higher law than the law of the land, or even the moral law as laid down in the Bible, when not in unison with their feelings. And we venture to prophesy, in case this doctrine shall gain general credence, that such will be the rocks on which multitudes will founder; for simple and ill-informed people may thus be led, and doubtless are, to do very wicked and mischievous acts, under the influence of this belief—a belief of their possessing this power, which no one ever did possess, unless inspired.
“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Prov. xvi. 25.
Thus we see there is a class of theologians, who, in hot pursuit of abolitionism, seem ready to sacrifice their Bible and its religion to the establishment of such principles as they deem wholly contradictory to, and incompatible with, the existence of slavery; and it is hence that they attempt to teach that man possesses an intuitive sense of its wrong. But shall we not be forced, with regret, to acknowledge, that there are quacks in divinity as well as in physic?