and towards men." It was no vague nor shifting standard, therefore, to which he appealed: no gentle nor easy task which he professed to take upon himself. It was nothing less than the observance of the very same duty, in his own case, which was urged by the ministers of Christ in the case of others; he tried "the spirits whether they were of God'" he examined his own heart, he proved "all things;" he held "fast that which was good"."

3

It would be therefore obviously an abuse of conscience, a misrepresentation of its sacred character both to ourselves and to others, if we were to attach the same importance, and to appeal with the same confidence, which the Apostle evinced, to its authority, unless we have the like grounds for so doing. "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but the Lord weigheth the spirit 3." It is even so. Interest, and passion, and custom may league together to deceive; and our hearts may love to be deceived, and say, "peace, when there is no peace;" but there is a balance in the hands of the Lord which weigheth our thoughts, and in those unerring scales, shall their hollowness be exposed. "To the law and to the testimony 5" therefore we must appeal. It is not among the dead, that we must expect to find the living; nor, amid the ruins of our fallen nature, the full perfections of eternal and unerring truth. We must repair,

earnestly and constantly, to those Sacred Oracles which reveal the mind of God to the soul of man. To these must conscience submit the interpretation of every word, and deed, and thought; and so far only as conscience dictates or approves things which are in harmony with that divine teaching; so far as it commands nothing and forbids nothing, which these have not commanded nor forbidden first, is it to be regarded as an authorized messenger of good, and be felt "void of offence towards God and towards men."

Now, if these considerations prove the necessity of exercising great carefulness and caution in determining aright the character of our own conscience; they prove also the danger, which must inevitably ensue from insisting upon rash or false pleas of conscience. For, if to sin against conscience, to dethrone i.e. its sovereignty within the heart, and drown its warning voice amid the wild uproar of fierce and contending passions, be a transgression of fearful magnitude,—how much more perilous a provocation of Divine wrath must it be to produce the very authority of conscience, this monitor of God, this vicegerent (as it is so often called) of His Holy Majesty, as an excuse for sin? For this is to trample upon God's law at the very moment when we profess to venerate God's authority; and so to call down upon our heads a more emphatic condemnation. Yet, that "the mystery of iniquity1" may, by

1 2 Thess. ii. 7.

The pleas,

such a fearful process, carry on its work, we know from the history of man's heart. for instance, which are so frequently brought forward to justify the indulgence of sin; and which attempt to show that, as men naturally follow various objects according to the varying influence of the interest or desire which may happen, at the time, most strongly to prevail, so every one may quietly submit to that impulse, in the assured conviction, that, by so doing, he is obeying only the law of his creation ;— pleas, which have been justly designated, by one of the mightiest masters of human reasoning, as licentious talk',' and which he has refuted by showing that they rest upon a manifestly false assumption of the meaning of the word nature, and are directly opposed to the assertion of St. Paul, already referred to, that they which have not the revealed law "are a law unto themselves:"-these pleas, I say, are among the many forms which that dangerous principle of evil, to which I have adverted, may assume. And although to put these delusive pleas in their extreme and most revolting character, to apply them with quick and ready ingenuity to justify reasoning however weak, or actions however unjust, be a consummation of obduracy not to be attained, till after a long and painful course of outrages committed against conscience, of repeated transgressions, of stifled convictions, of resisted mercies: yet, the entertainment

1 See Bishop Butler's Sermons, ut sup. p. 52.

of them, first of all, in matters which may be deemed of light importance, the extension of them afterwards to others of more doubtful tendency,— the successful application of them to silence misgivings, and to remove, one after the other, each doubt and difficulty that obtrudes itself;-these, our experience tells us, are but the ordinary steps which all sinners take in the downward path of destruction. Whatsoever be the nature of the subject to which they relate; by whatsoever arguments the attempt may be made to defend them, or to whatsoever results they lead, they are still modifications of the same pernicious principle; they are departures from that vital, that absorbing duty, in which the Apostle, sustained by the purifying hope of Christ, exercised himself.

It is no valid argument, on the other hand, to say, that men are sometimes found to maintain and act upon confessedly false and destructive principles, without feeling any 'compunctious visitings;' and that, being satisfied with this peace of conscience, they may safely remain in that security. As well may we look upon the calmness which sometimes pervades the ocean, as a proof that the heavens shall not lower, and the winds not gather up their strength, to lash it into fury. It is possible, remember, for conscience to have been oppressed so long and stubbornly, as to have lost all power to rise from her abasement, and assert her rights. Like any other

C

faculty of our nature, its

may finally destroy its use.

abuse must impair, and Nay, the great Apostle

of the Gentiles himself points to this dreadful issue, when he saith, that "unto them that are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled';" and again, yet more strongly, when he describes those who depart from the faith, as "having their conscience seared with a hot iron 2." The security, therefore, in which some persons would fain trust, is the tranquillity of the palace, in which the "strong man armed keepeth his goods in undisturbed possession; it is the infatuated pride of the destroyer, who hath made a solitude, and calls it peace; it is the passiveness of the spirit which is "past feeling 5;" it is the desperate composure of the adulterous woman, spoken of in the Book of Proverbs, who "eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness "."

3 "9

Now, so far from such a state of mind authorizing those who trust in it to deem that they are safe, it should be viewed rather as the most portentous symptom of their danger; the most alarming proof that God has given them up to the

2 1 Tim. iv. 2.

3 Luke xi. 21.

1 Tit. i. 15. 4 Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus, imperium; atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.-Tacitus, Agric. Vit.

c. 30.

5

Eph. iv. 19.

6

Prov. xxx. 20.