What Is Conscience? (screen 3)

Calvary Baptist Church, Grenada, MS, USA

Holding to the truths embraced by Baptist for centuries.

There are many of you before me who believe that ''every man has the right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience." You have, all your lives, heard politicians expatiate upon this great boon, secured to us by the Constitution; you have, all your lives, heard ministers from the pulpit thank God for this inalienable and inestimable right and privilege; you have met the sentiment every-where: and you believe as firmly as you believe in the Gospel of Matthew that man has the right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and that it is his duty to do so. This exalts the conscience above the Bible, and man above God, and tramples Christianity and its Founder into the dust. This is the identical "higher-law" doctrine of social and political agrarianism. What is the natural conclusion from this premise? It is, alas, what the majority of professed Christians and ministers North and South—all who teach for doctrine the commandments of men—teach; viz: that it matters little what man's religious sentiments are, or what doctrines a man believes, or how he worships God, if he is only conscientious in it! It teaches if a man is only honest and sincere in his worship,—fully satisfied in his own mind,— his religion is as good as any other man's, and that it should be respected as Christian; and you regard the man who would disturb him by religious discussions, or pronounce such a worship unscriptural or anti-christian, and the devotee of it in dangerous error, as an illiberal bigot, manifesting a very unchristian spirit. Is not this doctrine genuine Black Republicanism of the blackest stripe? Does it not place the dictates of a man's conscience above the revealed law of God Almighty? Is it not the rankest Abolitionism, as respects Christianity? Does it not abolish all distinction between right and wrong? For, according to this doctrine, what is right in me is wrong in another. Does it not abolish the Bible, the Law of God, and the authority of Jesus Christ? If the doctrine be true, each man's conscience is to him his Bible, his God and Savior. You see, you know it must be false; that it imperils the soul of every believer in it; that it is the gospel of damnation. Hear the voice of God, and start back from the, precipice on which you stand: "There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death." Paul once traveled that ''way" for a season; he was a most devoutly religious, pious, and honest man, worshiping his God "according to the dictates of his own conscience" with all zeal; and he regarded it as doing God and man a service to make havoc of the church of God,—to murder the last Christian, and exterminate Christianity from the earth. He declares that, in doing this,—"breathing out fire and slaughter" against the church of Christ, and ''hailing men and women to prison and to death," he was truly worshiping God according to the dictates of his own conscience. He declared he did it in all good conscience! But did he do right? Did he please God? According to your doctrine, I would have been an ''illiberal bigot" to have opposed him in his course, and attempted, by the word of God, to convince him that he was most egregiously wrong.

The moral man in our midst quietly rejects Christ and his atonement,— has no use for Christianity,— and says if he does as little harm as possible, and as much good to all as is in his power, he is quite satisfied that he will be saved. If you press him he will fling his Higher-lawism into your teeth,—for he is at heart an infidel— and tell you that he is conscientious and sincere in his way of serving God; that "every man has a right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience."

You meet the Unitarian, who makes it one of the special articles of his published creed to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Ghost, and attempt to convince him that he is wrong, and deny that he is, or can possibly be, a Christian, with such a faith, and he will meet you with the same doctrine: "One man's religion is as good as another's, if he is only conscientious in it, for each man has the inalienable right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience." So talks the Universalist, who denies a future hell, while he lives as though there were no God or future heaven. What can Christianity do, so long as it finds error mailed in such impenetrable armor as this? The idolatrous Pagans are sincere, and a thousand times more devoted than most professed Christians, in worshiping God according to the dictates of their own consciences; so, the followers of Mahomet; so are Greek and Roman Catholics. If conscience be the criterion of right, each of the above creeds, though contradictory, is true, and will equally save the soul.

Why, then, did Christ come into the world? What did sufferings and death effect, or his mission accomplish, but to create another sect, and still farther confound the religious confusion of earth? According to this theory, contradictory propositions, if only conscientiously believed, are each true, and things wholly unlike and unequal to the same thing, are equal to each other! That a man is saved by works alone, without Christ, or by faith and works conjoined, is as true as that a man is saved by grace alone. That baptism is designed to confer regeneration of heart, remission, and justification, is as true as that it is only for the open declaration, on the part of the subject, that he has obtained these, through faith in the blood of Christ, if the falsehood is only conscientiously believed. That die sinner is only, or unbeliever, even though unconscious, has a right to Christian baptism, is as true as that a believer in Christ has; that the ungodly and unconverted have as good a right membership in Christ's church, and to partake of the supper of the Lord (of which, if a man eat and drink without the proper qualifications, he eats and drinks damnation to his own soul), as the scriptural church member has at the table of his own church, provided each proposition be conscientiously believed! All sects or churches, no matter how opposite, variant and contradictory their forms of faith, or their rites and laws, if only composed of respectable, conscientious people, even though unconverted, are equally right and scriptural, and entitled to be called and respected as Christian churches, and their various religions as the Christian religion, if it only be granted that their upholders and adherents are only conscientious! The man who believes this believes also that God did not expect or design for all men to adopt the same religion—having "one Lord, one faith, and one baptism;" and he believes it is wrong for one religious man to oppose the faith and practices of another, and adopts the poetic dogma of Pope:

And this is the very sentiment of that couplet of licentious Byron, quoted by Worcester as an orthodox definition of conscience:

"Whatever creed be taught or land be trod, Man's Conscience is the Oracle of God!!"

Do you not see the utter absurdity and wickedness of this? The Bible is thrust aside, the voice of Jesus Christ rejected for the voice of an unerring conscience, Christianity overthrown, and the Judgment of the Great Day adjourned sine die.

Having thus demonstrated the absurdity of this second theory of Conscience by a reductio ad absurdum (proof by contridiction), I return to the great questions:

If it can not be either the independent verdict of human reason, or of human opinion or feeling, nor a separate sense, like the eye or ear, it is clearly the result of several faculties operating together—the result produced by all the intellectual faculties, enlightened by a given law or rule of action, human or divine.

Conscience roots itself in the belief of an infinite, holy, and just God, who takes cognizance of all our acts and thoughts, for which he will bring us into judgment. No God, no sense of right or wrong, no Conscience. God created man a moral intelligence; i.e., implanted within him the sense of right and wrong as intuitive ideas, or, which amounts to the thing, endowed him with such powers, and placed him in such circumstances, that he must necessarily acquire them. It is the universal conviction of all men, who believe in the existence of God, that it is their supreme duty to please him; that all things, acts or feelings, that accord with the will of God are right and commendable, and all that disagree are wrong and should be punished. This sense, innate or necessarily acquired by the use of our reasoning powers, is what distinguishes us as moral intelligences. There is also an innate impulse of the soul; that the right ought always to be done, and the wrong ought not to be done. It is not claimed, but denied, that God endowed man with a separate and distinct moral faculty that enables him unerringly to decide upon the moral quality of any and all acts; i.e., whether any given course of conduct will please God or not. Let it be distinctly understood by the reader that the soul, or, that which is treated as mind by mental philosophers, is not a complex something, made up of a multitude of distinct entities or faculties; as, reason, judgment, understanding, conscience, will, memory, imagination, etc., with many subdivisions. This way of speaking of the soul or mind is evidently confusing and misleading, and has led to a world of uncertainty and wrangling. There an no divisions in the soul. My whole soul reasons, judges, remembers, wills, and imagines, etc.; and not one part does one thing, and another part the other. As well say my body is made up of walking and running, eating and resting, etc,; these are but the operations of my body, as the above are acts of my mind or soul.

Conscience, therefore, can not be a distinct and independent faculty, but— like the terms reason, judgment, understanding— is only the name of a peculiar operation of the soul. This operation is the soul's sensing that a certain act—for certain reasons—is right and ought to be done; or, for certain reasons, wrong, and ought not to be done. One can always give the reason or reasons that influenced the decision, and, therefore, the act is not absolute and independent, like seeing, but involves the exercise of several powers of the mind; as, the unwinding, reason, judgment. This act of the soul in determining whether a certain course of action ought or ought not to be pursued, we call conscience, or a decision of conscience; as when the soul exercises its powers in comparing and deciding, it is called judgment; or, in recalling a past event, it is called memory. But it is denied that God has given to each moral being a distinct faculty which enables him to decide unerringly upon the moral quality of any act, i.e., whether it will please or displease God. Experience demonstrates that this is not the case, for there are the most diverse opinions concerning the right or wrong of a specified act—almost as many different shades of opinion as there are persons. The revealed will of God is the only infallible standard of right and wrong upon all questions, since from it alone we can learn, without doubt, the will of God concerning us. The sense of duty to love, worship, and obey God unconsciously and necessarily springs from a knowledge of the relations he sustains to us as our Creator, Preserver, and Benefactor. No moral being needs a revelation to teach him these duties. The heathen need no Bible to teach them these duties, and, therefore, we say they are right in themselves, and need not be commanded; but, concerning all positive duties, we do need an unerring revelation, since such are duties only because enjoined upon us by one who has the supreme right.