[CHAPTER V.]
THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIENCE.
By the supremacy of conscience is meant its right to exercise moral control. It expresses its proper authority. This authority is not to be thought of as original or independent, but as resting on and revealing the absolute authority of God, who has constituted the moral relations of the world and has set the conscience, with its discerning and regulative function, in the human soul. The question involved is not the right of one merely subjective faculty to impose obligation on another faculty or on all the human capacities and powers—one part of the personal self playing the role of sovereign over the other parts. This would be a shallow and misleading notion of this authority. The whole conception of the conscience is theistic, and implies, as it also testifies to, an absolute law of righteousness over all the world, established by Him who is creator and sovereign of all. It is in the discernment of this principle of rightness, with its demand for obedience to it, that the conscience comes into its position of authority and its authority becomes de jure supreme.
1. But the proof that such authority rightly belongs to it needs to be more fully exhibited. It is explained and made unquestionable in the following facts:
Its Sphere of Judgments.
(1) It is involved in the very sphere of its discernments. This sphere is the sphere of right and duty, which, by very conception, subordinate everything else. Its primary perception is of "the right," as having claim on every rational free agent—and then of obligation which immediately presses its moral requirement into the presence of our capacity for conformity to it. There is, indeed, a degree of authority belonging to each and all the psychical faculties, in the functions they fulfil for the direction and welfare of life. But the peculiarity of the conscience is that the realm of its functions and direction is higher than that of the other powers, the realm in which manhood reaches its supreme purpose and worth. Moral goodness, excellence of character, is the summit of the ascent to which human nature is adapted. In this our nature reaches the "supreme" and all-inclusive "good," compared with which all things else are of inferior claim and merit. The authority of the conscience, as a faculty, is thus identified with the supremacy which belongs to the idea of the morally right, of obligation, duty, the irrepealable "ought" for the conduct of life.
Shown by Nature of Action.
(2) This is more distinctly apparent when we recall the nature of its action. Psychologically, the conscience does not stand as a thing of our own personal will, or as in any way making the obligation which it presents. When we examine it, as it appears in our consciousness, its movement is in the form of a necessary perception of an obligation that is upon us irrespective of our will, a law of duty not of our own framing, but imposing itself on us and demanding the homage of our will. It possesses its authority, therefore, in the fact that it is the discernment of something higher than our will or ourselves, a principle transcending our personality and appearing as supreme law for our life and conduct. And the law connotes a lawgiver and a judge. The conscience thus puts us in the presence of One who has sovereign and absolute right to rule in us and over us. It thus becomes authoritative by its being the power or faculty through which is made known to us the principle or law of righteousness which God has established for the moral order of the world.[24]
The Contrary is Absurd.
(3) These facts, at once psychologically and metaphysically well certified, would themselves be sufficient to explain and vindicate the peculiar right of supremacy almost universally conceded to belong to the moral sense. But the proof, thus given, is confirmed by the fact that the contrary conclusion involves a manifest absurdity.