p. 27Conscience: Inner Rule of Duty

Duty is correspondence in conduct with the rules of right and wrong. What are these rules? We have seen that they are twofold—the law of God and the law of conscience. We dealt with the former in our last discourse. To-day we have to speak of conscience, the inner law of duty. The objective and essential morality of an action in the abstract springs from its conformity with law, the external, fixed, immutable, universal rule of duty. I allude, of course, to the moral law, the most perfect summary of which, in its main outlines, we find embodied in the Ten Commandments. All human laws to be just and binding must be framed in accordance with the law of God. All men find the law of duty traced in dim outline in reason. This law in its ideal perfection was proclaimed by Christ, and is upheld to-day in the Church as the one, perfect, external rule of duty.

But free human acts to be moral and worthy of the name of duty must conform with an inner rule, a norm of right and wrong, conscience. Law is for the body at large, conscience is for the guidance of the individual. It is through conscience that abstract law or duty is realized in action. It applies the outer rule of conduct to concrete acts. It is the law, e. g., that slander is a violation of duty, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” etc. The words I am tempted to utter, rings out my conscience, are slanderous, therefore a violation of duty.

We may appeal for mercy and excuse owing to ignorance, or forgetfulness of the law, but no appeal can be lodged once a man acts against the plain rule of conscience. He sins and irrevocably. Law is a map or chart of duty, conscience is a compass. If let alone the needle will invariably point true, i. e., to duty. The law is light from without, conscience is the eye that receives and applies it in vision. Light is ever light; but the visual organs may be diseased or distorted, still we are bound to use and make the best of it, as we have nothing else to see with. The law of God, “pure and undefiled,” like a ray of clear, bright light, is often broken up, and cast back from the mind or eye it falls on. The law is made applicable only through conscience. As it is conscience, not law, that eventually decides the momentous question of personal responsibility, therefore, it decides our moral state, before God. It makes or mars a man’s life. It renders us good or bad, worthy or worthless, godly or godless. It is life’s rudder. By following it or not we either steer to port or drift hopelessly to moral ruin. That it may be a safe inner rule of duty it will be helpful to dwell briefly (I) on what is meant by conscience, (II) on the lessons it teaches, and (III) indicate a few plain hints for its training and guidance; as, like all the other powers of mind and body, it needs schooling.

As I am not giving a course of lectures on moral science it is not my province to determine what conscience is physically or metaphysically. We deal with it only as a factor in duty. It may be observed, however, that in Catholic schools of thought conscience is not deemed a distinct faculty of the soul at all, but simply the mind exercising its activity on ethical or moral truth. The mind, meaning hereby the group of powers and functions coming under the head of intelligence, dealing with the rules and principles of duty or good conduct, is called conscience; or, loosely, the moral sense. Duty is not a matter of feeling or emotion, or of moral sentiment at all. It is based on the intellectual perception of law, as a force binding the conscience, and means conformity in action to the light of external law and inner light of conscience. The principles of morals or duty are as much an affair of mind as those of mathematics. “Good ought to be done and evil avoided,” is as self-evident an ethical or moral truth as “the whole is greater than the part” is in general knowledge. From these ethical principles we rapidly draw and apply conclusions to the facts of life that make up our daily round of duty. Conscience is an inference of an implicit, often intricate, act of reasoning in the sphere of morals. Thus “all forms of fraud are violations of duty,” is a general ethical principle or law. The mind goes on to reason, that failing to pay just debts, gross misrepresentation as to the quality and price of goods, are forms of fraud; therefore, certain acts of mine in my business dealings are violations of duty. Conscience is, therefore, a necessary concomitant of our intellectual nature. Animals kill, steal, give way blindly to passion; but there is no remorse because there is no sense of duty. They are neither moral nor immoral. They are in a state of innocence. Children, up to a certain age, and some backward races up to a certain point, seem incapable of guilt. Conscience is dormant in them or undeveloped, like their minds. Hence, conscience supposes the possession and use of reason. In fact, it is reason, as I said, dealing with moral truth. Its authority over conduct is supreme, at least subjectively. It is evidently meant to sway and regulate all the complex movements of the heart. It is, or ought to be, in the soul of man what the flywheel is to the engine, a balance to the watch—it should regulate its escapement, so to say. If you think of it, no free action is meant to escape conscience, thought, speech, behavior. No other impulse or motive should sway it, nor indeed can, without involving the soul in moral disaster—such as passion, love, self-interest. Though thus supreme, inwardly this must not be understood to mean that conscience is of supreme authority outwardly, or that, as is often foolishly said, there is nothing in the world higher or above conscience. Man is not God, nor is he a law to himself. Conscience is of subordinate authority—midway between the moral law to which it is bound to conform, and our conduct, which must conform to conscience, in turn. A man’s conscience may be quite wrong. It may give false signals. It may be culpably erroneous; if we take no pains to enlighten and correct it. For conscience, after all, is only fallible, and no more shielded against error than any other judgment of the mind dealing with truth. A man may easily mistake both the law and its application to actual facts, yet acted up to in good faith it justifies individual conduct and saves us from a breach of duty, i. e., from sin. It is the sole light to duty in action. Hence, we ever respect a man who we are sure acts conscientiously, however strange his conduct may seem. It is to each man the herald of the law. It pronounces authoritatively what is right and wrong in conduct; and when we do our best in the way of enlightening it by the aid of religion and morality, it is to us the voice of God. Hence, we esteem a man in proportion to his known conscientiousness. All other qualities yield to this. Conscience is, or ought to be, supreme ruler of the soul, for the very reason that it voices God. Bear in mind, however, that it is not the function of conscience to teach us what is right and wrong. That is the office of reason, helped by duly qualified teachers. Conscience only applies a law to the actual occurrences of daily life. As soon as I am convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the law binds me to do something, or leave it undone, conscience at once rightly orders me to do or omit it. Conscience, therefore, often saves from sin those whom we condemn. Hence, we should never judge another’s conscience, “To his own Lord he standeth or falleth.”

There are savage tribes who put their parents to death when old, out of sense of filial duty. The centurion who carried out the sentence of crucifixion and death of Christ acted under a strict sense of duty throughout. Murderers are criminals, whilst soldiers and hangmen are not, though they kill too. A man may be subjectively right and objectively wrong, and vice versa. Marcus Aurelius, as far as we can judge from history, and Titus also, were conscientious rulers; yet they made many martyrs to truth. “Yea the hour cometh,” says Our Lord, “that whosoever killeth you will think he doth a service to God” (John xvi, 1).

Strictly speaking, conscience, even in its most perverse state, is never wrong. It never commands evil, as such. When we do wrong we act against it. Even when drugged and vincibly erroneous, i. e., when we “ought to know better,” it ever cries, at least feebly, “Do what is right, shun what is wrong.” It is the mind that is wrong. The Scripture does not say, “Wo to you that obey a misguided conscience.” No, but, “Wo to you that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” The mind gives wrong names, and so perverts the conscience. The conscience was ever good in view. It is always loyal to duty. We may drug the mind with false views, we may use all kinds of sophisms to elude our plain duty, but conscience ever points to what is right, even though it is a wrong thing under a false name. Beware of corrupt literature and “new theologies,” as they lead the mind astray and thus mislead the conscience also. There are poems and novels with a purpose or a set of views to uphold that would degrade the conscience of a band of angels. So true is this that in many cases it is almost a moral danger to learn French. But to proceed, conscience, to be a safe and sure compass to duty, must be certain, i. e., we must be practically sure that what we are doing is not a breach of duty. There can be no wobbling, no lack of straightness in its decisions. We can not act morally under persistent actual doubt; in other words, whatever the law may be, we must make up our minds in some way or other that we are safe in acting as we do, i. e., with or against it. A soldier, e. g., may doubt whether war at all is right, he may even be certain, as many in some wars were, that it is unjust; yet he may conscientiously fight; because, though wrong or doubtful in the abstract, yet he, as a soldier, must obey. If we can not settle our doubts or perplexities we must stop acting altogether; or, if action is necessary, choose the safer and more probable side, or the lesser of two evils. In matters where conscience is concerned what we do must at least be morally permissible.

II. We have next to examine what this mysterious voice of conscience within us that seems ever to say, “You ought to do right, you ought not to do wrong,” teaches. As an inflexible inner rule of duty it bears witness to an ever present, overruling lawgiver, from whom the binding force of duty proceeds. Even science has come slowly round to proclaim the “immanence” of God in His creatures. The word is not objectionable, if it means that He is distinct from and above them; but duty and conscience declare His presence quite as forcibly, more so, indeed. No two thoughts disturb the peace of sinful men more than those of an ever present God and an ever intruding conscience. What systems have not been devised to explain away, and get rid of both; but in vain! As Our Lord foretold, the holy spirit of God in and through the voice of conscience is ever “convincing the world of sin.” Were these two concepts mere creations of fancy—shadows of self—we should have banished them long ago. Great thinkers were not and are not wanting to help weaker brethren in the process; but no! The law that conscience calls us to observe is not of our making, or of that of our fellowmen. We suffer no remorse in eluding an act of Congress or the by-laws of a village council. We judge their worth and justice and force by comparison with a supreme law above ourselves—the moral law; and the Supreme Being who framed it, Almighty God. We say that conscience is our judge; but we mean God judging in us. We feel that we are being daily weighed, sifted, tried by one not ourselves. We may elude a carping monitor, we may escape the arm of justice, we may kill an aching nerve; but the worm of conscience we can never utterly destroy. Passion, pleasure, gain may drown its voice for a time, but it soon gets heard again above the world’s din. It stands the most hardened hearts—even those of the Pharaos, the Herods and the Neros, past, present and to come. It is God’s holy spirit doing His wish in the human heart.

Again, conscience bears witness to the paramount supremacy of duty. It teaches us the lesson of the need of submission to its own authority. Even in spite of ourselves—against all the passions of the heart combined in common league against it—it persists in affirming that duty is supreme; that its fulfillment, even if it did not lead to happiness in this life, which it mostly does, and assuredly will in the next, is the main purpose of life; and that its transgression by sin is the deepest wrong we can inflict on our own souls. Conscience will not tolerate a rival. It will never leave us at peace till we reckon its authority as supreme in the soul. Now, it has but one theme—a theme it never varies—viz., do your duty. It excuses everything else almost. It never stings, pains or wounds, except when we commit a breach of duty bending under sin. A man may break all the rules of grammar. He may trample on the whole code of etiquette, he may offend against every canon of good taste and refinement, he may be a boor, a bounder and a Philistine, and know it and feel it too; and yet he will never suffer a single pang of conscience; but let him slander or defraud, or turn sensual, and his conscience will be up in arms against him at once. Hence Our Lord’s warning to “make peace with our enemy on the way,” i. e., with our own conscience by repentance. Conscience has but one command—one lesson—one counsel, duty; one enemy, sin.

True, it may for a time be deadened with spiritual morphine and chloroform so deftly furnished by some moral specialist in soul diseases to-day; but it is sure to wake up, and gnaw, and torment as before. It can not be extracted, or cut off, like an aching tooth or diseased limb, for it is God asserting His rights to supreme sway, even over our free will.

III. The higher and better self, in contradistinction to the lower and animal self, is simply the soul living up to conscience. We live our best in living conscientiously.

But, like every other God-given faculty, the conscience needs training. All the powers of the soul coalesce in an act of duty, intellect, memory and will; so that conscience, the inner rule and measure of duty, loosely speaking, is a combination of them all. Now, look at what training does for the mind. Compare a stupid savage with a modern professor; yet both are dowered with the same essential mental powers; education makes the difference. To master the lowliest art or trade one must train hand and eye. All success in life is due to the special training of some one faculty or other with which we are endowed. Training is use. Though conscience, more than any other power of the soul, is divine, yet it, too, is subject to the general law of development and growth—in other words, it must be trained—it must be educated. We meet people who seem to have lost all conscience—who appear to see no perceptible difference between right and wrong—who, in short, have no sense of duty. If there is any conscience left it is rudimentary—a mere stump, like a limb withered away through lack of use. Grace, no doubt, is necessary to duty; but grace must find something on which to fasten, i. e., a trained conscience. And just as we see a vast difference between the skilled and the unskilled, the ignorant and the highly intellectual, so is it in the field of conscience. In fact, there are individuals, classes, nations in whom it seems dormant or lost. And yet, even in its natural state, it is man’s highest endowment, and the very cement of the social fabric. No conscience, no duty; and without duty society must, sooner or later, collapse.

The body in its every nerve and muscle, to be fit and alert, calls for air, light and exercise. So does the conscience, morally. It needs light and saving grace from above and daily, nay, hourly practise from within. It is unjust to our conscience to let it grow wild and untilled, just as it is to let a child grow up without training.

What conscience needs most, in the way of guidance, is a knowledge, deep and extended, of God’s holy law—the will of God—the eternal never changing standard of right and wrong. Hence, the value of daily religious instruction in and out of school. Knowledge of duty, it is true, is no guarantee of its observance; but ignorance for certain entails its neglect. An enlightened Catholic conscience is the loftiest index of moral truth and duty. There no false weights or measures are to be seen, say what her enemies may. And why? Because they are duly stamped and measured in accordance with “the pattern on the mount,” the truth as it is in Jesus, i. e., in God. We set our time pieces with the sun. Therefore, keep your conscience straight and trustworthy by making them echo the great external rule of duty, the law of God. In her authorized catechisms and manuals of instruction you have the safe and guaranteed standard of the supreme law.

From earliest childhood we should be trained, as indeed most Catholic children are, to listen to and follow this inner law of duty. It is the bell of God’s law. It is the clock that tells us the hour when duty is to be fulfilled. If honestly acted up to conscience is God’s call to us. Its decisions, even when erroneous, are not to be resisted without disaster to the soul. By it we stand or fall before God.

In our formulas for night prayer there is usually a pause inserted for the examination of conscience: it is a necessary preliminary, moreover, for a good confession. Now, all this indicates a daily searching of heart as one of the best means of keeping the conscience bright and lustrous. The daily practise of it at stated times and by regular methods is the secret of the wondrous delicacy of conscience that characterizes those high schools of refined and cultured piety—convents and monasteries. Hearing is lost by stopping the ears to sound, the sight by closing the eyes or shutting out the light; and so conscience by closing the eye and ear of the soul to God’s holy law. Daily examen means practise and training of our highest faculty, that of apprehending right and wrong. Yet, like any other power, it may by disuse become warped, scared and deadened. This evil we shall avoid by ever keeping our conscience tuned and strung in unison with God’s law, witnessed to and expounded by the Church.