Conscience as God's Supreme Authority in the Soul

"How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof." These words emerge from a young man whose dissolute life has wrought disease, want, and infamy upon him. He stands at the dim verge of existence, a beacon light to all who live without Elohim. Remorse, like a fierce vulture, clutches upon his soul; despair casts the shadows of a cheerless night around him. Yet his keenest anguish arises not from external circumstance, but from moral reflection—from the voice of conscience itself.

Consider conscience as God has enthroned it in the human breast: with all the attributes of sovereignty. Unlike the brute animal, which rushes toward gratification without thought beyond the immediate object, man brings under his eye the just relations of universal being. He chooses and pursues with awareness.

Conscience teaches us to perform in good faith that which we do, though it does not itself supply an independent rule of right. Its voice is gentle and persuasive—often drowned in the clamour of passion or unheeded in eager pursuit of forbidden pleasure. Yet if conscience is supreme according to the original constitution of our nature, it must possess an ascendant power over the animal propensities, taking the whole range of existence into account.

This is the instrument of punishment: not external judgment alone, but the soul's own witness against itself. The dissolute young man's suffering proves that Adonai has given us a power of self-government that cannot be permanently silenced.