There is a good story of a gang of moonlighters who had shot a landlord, and were afterwards sitting down to supper. One man was just raising a piece of meat to his lips when the clock struck twelve. Instantly he dropped the meat. "Be jabers!" he said, "'tis Friday!"
That was the habit of abstaining from meat on a Friday. It had been drilled into his memory, and it acted mechanically.
Conscience, then, is largely a matter of habit: it depends a great deal on what we are taught. But it is not wholly a matter of habit, nor does it depend wholly on our teaching.
We all know that two brothers, born of the same parents, brought up in the same home, educated at the same school, taught the same moral lessons, may be quite different in the matter of conscience. One will shrink from giving pain, the other will be cruel; one will be quite truthful, the other will tell lies.
And so to go back to our rifleman and our cricketer. Every novice does not flinch from the recoil, every batsman is not prudent. No. Because men are different by nature.
Some boys are easy to train; some are not. Some are naturally obedient; some are not. Some are naturally cruel; some are naturally merciful.
The conscience of a boy depends upon what he is by nature and what he is taught.
If the emotion of anger is naturally strong in a boy it will need a better-drilled memory to check his anger than if the emotion of anger were weak.
I do not mean it will need more teaching to curb his "will," but it will need more teaching to build up his conviction that anger is wrong, because the motion resists the teaching.
But in the case of a boy gentle and merciful by nature it needs no teaching to prevent him from torturing frogs, and very little to make him know that to torture frogs is wrong.