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(with John 8:9): — Like every other mental and moral power, conscience has its own distinct function. It is that faculty of our moral nature Which perceives the right and wrong in our actions, accuses or excuses, and anticipates their consequences under the righteous government of God.

I. CONSCIENCE IS AN ORIGINAL LAW IN MAN'S MORAL NATURE. Being so, it is the same in all men, civilised and uncivilised. It cannot be educated any more than the eye can be taught to see, or the ear to hear. The only training a man can be given is in applying the law of conscience to the conduct, and in the art of subjecting the other powers of the soul to its authority. When conscience is spoken of as enlightened and unenlightened, there is applied to it what properly belongs to some of the other powers with which it is associated, particularly the understanding. Being intended for all classes the Scriptures are written not in metaphysical, but in popular language, and therefore, while it is proper to make such distinctions as those we have just indicated, we shall at present treat of conscience in the popular, that is in the Bible, sense. "Their own conscience" is an expression which suggests these two things, viz., that every man is endowed with this faculty, and that it is an essential part of his being, so really his own as to be inseparable from him, and indestructible. But conscience is not now in any man what it originally was. In consequence of sin, the moral law written at first on the fleshly tables of the heart had lost much of its clearness and certainty, like a scarcely legible inscription on a decaying gravestone. It had therefore to be deeply graven by the finger of God on tables of stone, and afterwards given in the imperishable Book, which could be read in every tongue throughout the habitable globe. But while conscience is not now in anyone what it once was, and has in some reached its lowest possible degree of weakness, in different persons it may exist in different states. Paul speaks of some who had their conscience seared with a hot iron. As that part of the flesh becomes insensible to pain, so conscience, under the habit of sinning, comes to be so familiar with evil that its accusing voice is, if at all, but faintly heard. It is past feeling. Jude speaks of some ungodly men in his day as being twice dead, implying that their conscience had been once quickened, but that it had again sunk into its previous condition of torpor and paralysis, which was little different from death. Having been dead before, it was thus twice dead. The man whose conscience is in this condition will practise lying, dishonesty, intemperance, and uncleanness, without often thinking he is doing wrong, and without at all dreading the consequences of his wrong-doing. A more hopeful condition of conscience is that which is described as a pricking in the heart. This was how the first converts on the day of Pentecost were affected. A more appropriate phrase could not easily be found to portray the same moral change in any who undergo it. Piercing sorrow, sharp mental pain, is what it points to. Yet, distressing though it be, this is an interesting and hopeful state of mind. The thunder is not a more certain presage of a pure and settled atmosphere; the storm is not the more certain forerunner of a calm; the opening buds and genial breezes of spring are not the surer signs of retreating winter than are those prickings of heart, the signs of a spiritual winter breaking up in the soul, and of a spring of life and growth and beauty having come. Then there is also the peaceful conscience. True peace can come from only one source, When a man sees that Jesus Christ has by His obedience unto death borne the penalty of his sin, and when he accepts of God's forgiveness through Christ, his fears leave him, his conscience is pacified, hope springs up in his breast. He may now and again have his regrets and his fears, but as his knowledge of the Saviour and of His work with his own purity of heart and life increases, so does his peace become fuller and more settled.

II. IT IS BY CONSCIENCE THAT CONVICTION OF SIN IS PRODUCED. There are no doubt other powers which cooperate with it to bring about this result. There is the understanding. Truth and duty must be known before they can be believed and practised. A man cannot rightly realise his sinfulness until he knows what God's law requires of him, nor believe the gospel, which is God's great revelation to us, before he knows what it means. Without a knowledge of its truths there cannot be faith, and without an increasing knowledge of its truths there cannot be much progress in goodness. There is also the will. The renewal of our moral nature presupposes as one of its conditions the subduing of the will, and the bringing of it into harmony with the will of God. There are, it is true, preliminary steps in this inward change, such as the enlightening of the mind with regard to sin and salvation, and the melting of the heart into penitence and contrition, but there is, besides, the bending of the will to choose and to follow the Divinely appointed way of deliverance. And, humanly speaking, it is here the greatest difficulty in the work of conversion is met with. The hardest of all struggles is to conquer a man's self-righteous pride, that he may humbly and thankfully accept eternal life as God's free gift to the undeserving who believe in His Son.

III. IT IS BY THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL THAT CONSCIENCE IS AWAKENED. The teachings of science and philosophy are powerless here. Only the truth as it is in Jesus can work its way into the deep recesses of man's nature, stir into life its slumbering activities, meet all its wants, and satisfy its highest aspirations. No other truth can give us a fixed and unchanging standard of duty outside of ourselves and not subject to our variations, show us how far we come short of it, and set before us with certainty the fixed and indissoluble connection there is between cause and consequence in the moral universe. No other truth has the same self-evidencing power.

(James Black, D. D.)

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KJV: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)

WEB: in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying with them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or else excusing them)