May not conscience be a prejudice, the result of education and of habit?
It has little power, it seems, for it is braved with impunity. Many say
that it is a factitious power from which one comes at last to deliver
one's self by resisting it. Am I not the dupe of an illusion? I am
losing joys which others allow themselves. Barriers encompass me on
every hand, for there are for me prohibited actions, unwholesome
beauties, culpable feelings. Others are free, and make a larger use of
life in all directions. What if I too made trial of liberty!" Here lies
the temptation. When the soul aspires to become larger than conscience
and more tolerant than duty, it is not far from a fall. The honest woman
will be tempted to repine at the liberty of the courtesan, and the man
who is bound by his word will become capable of looking with envy on
the liberty of the liar. Then come terrible experiences which teach at
length that the unbinding of the passions is the hardest of slaveries,
and that, in the struggle between inclination and duty, it is liberty
which oppresses and law which sets free. Happy then is he who, feeling
himself to be sinking in gloomy waters, cries to that God who is able to
rescue him from the abyss, and strengthens his shaken conscience by
replacing it on its solid foundation. "God speaks and reigns. All
rebellion is transient in its nature; justice will at length be done.
Justice may be slow in the eyes of the creature of a day, seeing that He
who shall dispense it has eternity at his disposal." But if God be not a
refuge for us from men and from the world, if, when we see all that is
passing around us, we cannot cast a look beyond and above the earth, men
may lose their faith in duty. And this faith is lost in fact. If there
are not dead consciences, there are consciences at any rate singularly
sunk in sleep. There are men for whom goodness, truth, justice, honor,
seem to be a coinage of which they make use because it is current, but
without for themselves attaching to it any value. These pieces of money
have no longer in their eyes any visible impression, because the