What Is Conscience? (screen 2)

Calvary Baptist Church, Grenada, MS, USA

Holding to the truths embraced by Baptist for centuries.

I do not misrepresent the theory of conscience so universally received in this country and in England when I sum it up in these few sentences: The conscience is a distinct faculty, like the eye, and, therefore, like our senses, can not be instructed by law, human or divine; that its dictates are always infallibly right; that it is the ultimate and highest source of appeal; and that its monitions should be obeyed at all costs, "all other things," even God's Bible, "to the contrary notwithstanding," and "uncaring consequences." It would seem that propositions so frightful as these would strike the mind of every thinking, and especially every religious man, with horror, but, strange to say, it meets with almost universal approbation; and it finds its most constant and enthusiastic supporters in the Protestant and Catholic ministers of this country. I have most bitterly opposed and exposed this theory for more than a quarter of a century, as a student, an editor and minister, as the doctrine and gospel the pit, fraught with every form of evil to society and governments, and as certainly destructive of the soul as of the very principles of Christianity!

If conscience be a distinct moral sense, sustaining the same relation to facts in morals that the other senses—sight, taste, smell, etc.—do to facts in nature, then its decisions, like those of the eye and the ear, are fixed, reliable, and unalterable; no instruction, no laws, no change of country or society, no religion, no amount of knowledge from other sources, can affect its decisions; they are absolutely fixed and infallible, and the decisions of all men, in all nations, touching the moral quality of any and every act, must be the same, as are the decisions of each and all the senses in all men. To the Hottentot and the Esquimau black is black and white is white, sweet is sweet and bitter is bitter, as well as to the most educated Caucasian. The senses in their normal condition are infallible in their decisions. To suppose instruction or increased knowledge or the Word of the living God, to avail to correct the errors of the sense of conscience in regard to moral acts, would be as preposterous as to suppose the legal opinions of Blackstone or Coke, Moses or Christ, would avail to reverse the judgment of the eye in regard to colors, or the sense of smell in regard to odors. Men must, then, infallibly agree respecting the decisions of the conscience, not only in a multitude of cases, but in all cases where moral actions are the object, as they agree in the decisions of all the senses. Black is black, white is white, bitter is bitter, sweet is sweet, to all men of all nations; but do all men, or even the members of the same family, agree in regard to the moral quality—the right and wrong—of religious acts? There is the utmost diversity. The Christian's conscience stings him with remorse for doing what the Pagan approves, the Protestant's conscience for doing what the Catholic's conscience approves, and the conscience of the Baptist for doing what both Protestants and Catholics approve as religious and right. How do we account for this?

They have all the same Sense, or Faculty of conscience, if it be a Sense; but their views of right and wrong, owing to the difference of education, are widely different, and consequently it can not be a "Distinct Sense" or "Moral Faculty." The demonstration is clear.

It may be said that the Pagan's or Catholic's conscience is denied. There is no question of it; but that admission, instead of meeting the difficulty, surrenders the statement that the conscience is a distinct faculty or sense. The Pagan and the Catholic may say that the Christian's or Protestant's conscience is defiled; and who shall decide between them? Who ever heard it charged that a heathen's sense of sight or smell was defiled? No one; since nothing but physical injury can affect the operation of die physical senses. Who ever heard of a Pagan's Senses discerning things so differently from those of a Christian? No difference of education or character can alter the decisions of the Senses in reference to their appropriate objects. The Pagan's sense of sight reveals to him all colors, his sense of taste all flavors, just as the Christian's does to him. The reason why men religiously differ must be obvious to the dullest apprehension,—because conscience is not, like the eye, a sense, but the creature of education. The experience of all men also refutes this theory. The children of two families, though separated by only a yard-fence, can be made to possess consciences wholly unlike and contradictory touching every religious action. What the consciences of the one pronounce to be right, the consciences of the others pronounce wrong. The children of one family are taught by Jewish or Catholic teachers, and those of the other by Christian ones. Now, interchange the teachers, and the verdicts of the consciences of those children will soon be the very opposite of what they were before. This fact also disproves the theory.

This theory is opposed to the teachings of God's Word. That teaches us that a man may have a good conscience, or an evil or defiled one. "Pure," "evil" or "defiled" are terms that can not be predicated of the Senses. Paul declared that he had ''lived in all good conscience before God;" and yet that very course of action he pursued so conscientiously—even the delivering men and women to death for no other reason save they believed on Jesus of Nazareth—he afterwards condemned as most sinful; and for which, though he believed God had forgiven him, he never forgave himself, and accounted himself the least of all saints and not deserving to be called an apostle of the Lord. He charged others with having a defiled conscience; he taught that an evil and defiled conscience could be changed into a good one, so that its decisions would be the very opposite of what they were before the change; but the decisions of a Sense can not be changed; and, therefore, if the Bible is true, conscience is not a Sense.