Once more the old story avails us. Hath God said Ye shall not eat?' is the insinuated suggestion that creeps into most men's minds. I suppose that the number of us who, with clear eyes, knowing the thing at the moment that we do it to be wrong, do yet resolve that, wrong as it is, it shall be done, is comparatively few. I suppose that by far the majority simply ignore the question of right or wrong, when the question of pleasant and desirable comes to be canvassed. Before the committal--as I was saying a moment ago--we have an awful power of silencing our consciences. Just as housebreakers carry some drugged meat for the house-dogs when they intend to break into soma lonely farmhouse so we are all adepts in applying gentle phrases to our own evil, while if the same thing is done by anybody else we shall flame up in indignation, as David did when Nathan told him about the man and his one ewe lamb. Therefore comes to this--do not you trust to instinctive utterances of inclination calling itself conscience. (Remember that you can bribe conscience to say anything but that it is right to do wrong. You will get it to say anything that you teach it about what is wrong and what is not. And therefore you must find a better guide than conscience. You have to enlighten it and educate it and check it, and keep it wakeful and suspicious, as the price of purity.
The same set of lies about the criminality of our actions operates with still greater effect after the committal. I was speaking a moment or two ago about the sudden waking of conscience when the deed is done. But there is a worse thing than that, and that is when conscience does not wake. That is the condition, I have no doubt, of many people listening to me now. She wiped her mouth and said I have done no harm. You can muffle the bell so that there will come no sound. You can sear your hand, if you once press a hot iron upon it; and you can make the cuticle of your conscience, if I may so say, just as insensitive by the same process. So then, my friend, do you take care that you do not thus darken the light that is in you, till it becomes darkness. And remember also that your knowing nothing against yourself does not prove you to be blameless. There is neighing harder than to drive home the consciousness of sinfulness I can fancy what is passing in some, as they listen to me now. Some of you refer all that I am saying to that other man in the corner there, whom it will fit so well. Some of you are saying to yourselves, Oh yes, I admit it all in a general way'; but not summoning up in your mind any of the evils which cling and cleave to you individually. And some of you are trying to break the force of what I am saying by theories about responsibility, and how a man is the creature of circumstances and the like; or by pleading in arrest of judgment your better side: I am a respectable man. Nobody can find any fault with me. I am a good father, a good husband, an honest tradesman, a man of my word, a cultured gentleman perhaps, a student, a man abhorring gross sin, and so forth'; and your words have nothing at all to do with me.' Ah! have they not? Departing from the living God'; that is the sin that I am talking about, brother--not going and getting drunk, stealing, wallowing in thesty of sensualism; not the mere external acts. The kernel of all sin is living to ourselves. That is what I want to. lay upon all your consciences. And that is the hardest of all results for even the most earnest and pleading words to effect, in the minds of the respectable, selfcomplacent, gospel-hardened people that come and fill these pews.
