Conscience, and what is conscience?
Is it not that silent but powerful monitor within
that weighs our every motive? is it not the small still
voice that whispers its approval when we have acted
right, but bursts like the crashing thunder peal or
the terrific earthquake, when we have acted wrong?
She stands with extended finger a silent though faithful
friend, and points us onward in the plain path of duty.
We have only to follow her dictates, and all will
be well. But many gaudy flowers are blooming
here and there beside the path, to tempt the thoughtless
one to step aside and pluck; but though they are beautiful
to the eye, and their fragrance borne to us by the
breeze, seems to woo us temptingly, yet, concealed
within their leaves is a deadly scorpion or poisonous
asp, whose sting is instant death, or some, perhaps,
contain a more slow and sluggish poison, that creeps
into the mind, and instilling its venom by slow degrees,
corrupts the whole. Conscience has well been
called the tell tale of our breasts.
How does it harrow up the mind at
the still hours of midnight, when all nature sleeps
around, and depict crimes that no eye has witnessed
but God and their perpetrators; how does the murderer
toss from side to side beneath her lash, and see his
victim for the thousandth time in the agonies of death;
over and over again, she acts the bloody scene, and,
while he turns restless and feverish upon his pillow,
still holds the picture bleeding fresh to fancy’s
wearied gaze, and as in Macbeth, presents the dagger,
while “on its blade and bludgeon are drops of
blood that were not so before.” Crimes of
dye not so deep, are conjured up to harrow up the
breast and rack the brain, and render the victim of
a disapproving conscience a miserable wretch indeed.
Truly she is placed within us as a
friend, warning us of danger and pressaging good.
If we would listen to her dictates, we must be happy,
for she never argues wrong. And superlatively
happy are they who can lay calmly down on the bed
of death cheered by her approving smiles, for a “death
bed is a detector of the heart;” here tired dissimulation
drops the mark that through life’s grimace has
kept up the scene.