THE MORAL LAW
t often happens that a very familiar word is commonly misunderstood. Take for example the word that shall concern us in this talk---"conscience." Everyone pays at least lip-service to conscience. Everyone thinks, or pretends to think, that conscience is somehow sacred and inviolable. Even those who don't believe in God, often insist that they honor conscience more than those who do believe in Him. In fact, certain agnostics tell us that they decline to believe, not because they love religion less but because they love conscience more. Even those who reject belief in the soul, still sometimes hold to conscience. Now here is an anomaly. Conscience, the voice of God, the voice of the soul, still revered by those Who reject God and the soul!
What is this wonderful, mysterious, venerable thing called conscience? Many philosophers and moralists have attempted a definition. Schopenhauer (an exception to the rule that everyone reveres conscience) analyzes it as though it were some sort of chemical compound and declares conscience to be composed of equal parts of fear, superstition, prejudice, vanity And custom. Even more contemptuous was Bradlaugh, a kind of English Bob Ingersoll, who said that conscience is only a spasm of the diaphragm, like a sneeze or a cough. Decent people generally will find such statements sacrilegiously flippant, but I doubt if the brazen infidels are more to be blamed than those timid agnostics, who "half believe they half believe, half doubt the substance of their own half doubt," and therefore attempt to hold to conscience without God and without the soul. Speaking frankly, if there is no God, nothing is either good or bad, right or wrong. In that case, conscience, which purports to tell right and wrong, good and bad, is a delusion. If there be no soul, man is only a brute animal (disguise the ugly fact as you may) and a brute animal can have no conscience. If we get rid of God and the soul, logically we shall have to go all the way and get rid of conscience. We cannot eat our cake and have it too.
Infidels ridicule conscience, and agnostics hold it insecurely. But even religious minded persons not seldom have a perilously vague concept of conscience. To judge from the conversation of certain amateur theologians, one might imagine that conscience is an instinct, or a sentiment, or a feeling, irresponsible, and a law unto itself, a solitary something living a life of its own, somewhere in the inner man, shouting its commands, with reason or without reason, superior even to divine revelation.
The truth is that conscience is nothing more or less than the human mind itself uttering its judgments upon matters that pertain not to speculation but to action and more particularly to action that is imminent action to be performed here and now and not at some future time. Let me illustrate. Hamlet in the famous soliloquy proposes the question "To be or not to be." He ponders "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them." As far as speculation is concerned, he seems to lean to the idea that it were better to "leave the world with a bare knife," and so to "end this mortal coil." But just when that thought might lead to action, conscience steps in, warning him that "the Everlasting God: has fixed His law against self-slaughter," and so therefore suicide is a sin.
Now the mind of Hamlet, or anybody's mind which considers the question speculatively, is the self-same mind that commands "Thou thalt not." The mind reflecting upon an intellectual problem is called the intellect or the reason. The mind commanding good and forbidding evil is called conscience. Conscience therefore is nothing else but the mind issuing a dictate as to the morality of an action.
But even though conscience is essentially a human quality, it is endowed with a seemingly divine influence. Indeed the importance of conscience in our theology is amazing and perhaps all but incredible to persons, who are not familiar with Catholic moral teaching. For there exists, I fear, a rather general suspicion amongst those not of our fold, that because we Catholics believe the Church to possess infallible authority, we must therefore deny the dignity of conscience. There is an old phrase about the Chancellor of England being "keeper of the king's conscience." And perhaps there are some who fancy that the Church is held to be the keeper of the conscience of Catholics. But no institution and no person, no Church, no pope can claim dominion over conscience. Amongst all inalienable rights, the rights of conscience come first. A man has a right to call his soul his own. A right and a duty. No one may usurp another's conscience. Nor may any man surrender conscience. In the moral life conscience comes first and last; first, since the soul is antecedent to the Church; last, because even when the Church has spoken, there remains conscience as the last court of appeal. Beyond priest, preacher, prophet; beyond the Bible and the Church, a man may appeal to conscience. We may even make bold to say that in a certain sense, a man may appeal from God to conscience. God may, speak, God may thunder. But if man does not hear, or hearing does not understand, he still will be saved if he follow conscience. John Stuart Mill wrote with a touch of melodrama unexpected in a philosopher, "If an omnipotent being can condemn me to hell for refusing to believe what I see no reason for believing, then to hell I will go." He meant his pronouncement to be a slam against Christian teaching. But the Catholic theologian will find no fault in it, except the irreverent phrasing. A man cannot go to hell except by violating conscience. Catholic faith in this matter has been forcefully expressed by the Fourth Ecumenical Lateran Council which declared: "He who acts against his conscience loses his soul."
On the other hand he who follows conscience, right or wrong, cannot be lost. Cardinal Newman, who has assembled the teaching of many theologians on this matter, quotes a Spanish Franciscan, Antonio Corduba, who says: "In no manner is it lawful to act against conscience, even though a law or a superior commands it," and this same doctrine is reinforced by Natalis Alexander, a French Dominican, who says: "If in the judgment of conscience, though a mistaken conscience, a man is persuaded that what his superior commands is displeasing to God, he is bound not to obey," And says Newman, "the word 'superior' certainly includes the pope."
Finally the Cardinal cites a long list of the highest authorities in Catholic moral theology who declare that "conscience must always be obeyed whether it is a true conscience or an erroneous conscience and whether the error is the fault of the person thus erring or not." "If," he adds, "a man is to blame for being in error, which he might have escaped had he been more in earnest, for that error he is answerable to God, but still he must act according to that error while he is in it, if in full sincerity he thinks the error to be truth." In other words, a bad action becomes good, and a good action with a bad conscience becomes bad. For example we read that Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to, the poor. He counted that a virtue. It was therefore no sin for him. A head hunter in the wilds of Borneo considers it no crime to creep through the jungle, catch a man from a neighboring tribe unawares, lop off his head and carry it home as a trophy. He knows no better. He commits no sin. An ancient Spartan or a Roman philosopher, who, tired of life, deliberately fell upon his sword, or the modern Japanese who commits hara-kiri, is not, guilty of sin if, forming his conscience on the moral code of his country, or of his religion, he thinks his action virtuous. If Oliver Cromwell the English politician and Catholic-hater of the 17th century was so thorough-going a fanatic as to imagine God had chosen him to obliterate the Irish off the face of the earth, the butcheries he committed in Ireland were not murder. And---not to prolong this catalogue of examples---if Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus Christ to death was conscious of no wrong, he was guilty of no crime. Our Savior Himself said, "The hour cometh when whosoever killeth you will think that he doth a service to God." If he think he doth a service to God, God will not condemn him. More than that, he shall have reward in heaven for doing what he thought was good, even though it was multiple homicide.
It must be obvious then that conscience is not infallible. It can be mistaken. After all, have we not said that conscience is the mind of man, and not a special, separate, supernatural faculty? The mind of man is liable to all kinds of mistakes, even most tragic and ghastly mistakes. The mind of man is clouded with sin and error. His own sins and the sins of the race, both tend to obscure the natural light of reason and even the supernatural light of grace. And when the mind, the mind that speculates and reasons, is darkened, conscience, the mind that commands, is sure to blunder.
But let no one think that since a man is justified if he act in accordance with conscience, he is therefore excused from the duty of enlightening his conscience. It is quite possible to do an action in good conscience today and to do the same action in bad conscience tomorrow. Yesterday it was no sin. Today it is a sin. Between times a man may have had the chance to learn that his action was wrong. Once he has learned, he sins if he repeats the action. Paul, for example, persecuted the followers of Jesus. He was hounding them to death. But up to the moment of the dramatic episode on the road to Damascus, he committed no sin in killing Christians. After he had heard the voice of Jesus, it would have been murder. Of course a man may see the light, and yet turn his back upon it. King Agrippa, to whom in later, days Paul preached the Gospel, confessed "a little more and thou persuadest me to be a Christian." If the king refused to go ahead with "the little more," fearing that to adopt the Christian religion would involve unwelcome obligations, he may have been from that moment in bad faith, that is to say, in bad conscience. No man can be saved who knowingly turns his back upon truth and shuts his eyes to the light. Inculpable, invincible ignorance excuses from sin, but wilful ignorance is itself a sin and the cause of a thousand sins. Indeed the voluntary and permanent blinding of the eyes of the mind is the unpardonable sin. It is the duty of the individual not only to act in accordance with conscience, but, according to his opportunity, to develop and perfect his conscience. One who refuses to be enlightened or neglects the chance to be enlightened, and then alleges that he is acting "in good conscience," is really acting in bad conscience.
There is a doctrine current amongst certain moralists of our day to the effect that morality means, after all, only conformity with the custom of the time and the place in which we find ourselves. Catholic ethics has no countenance for such a theory. If a man violates his own conscience to conform with public opinion, he is on the way to lose his soul. No man may act upon another mans conscience. If my conscience says a thing is wrong, though your conscience calls it right, I must follow my conscience. It would be a sin for me to follow yours. If in the day Judgment I say "Lord, I suppressed my own conscience, and adopted my neighbor's," I shall hear from the Great Judge, "You shall be judged by your own conscience, and by no other! Likewise, if ten thousand neighbors or ten million, or a hundred million neighbors think that that a certain action or a certain course of conduct is good, and I think it bad, I must not do that action. It ends up to be my conscience against the world!
If, therefore, while we exalt conscience above priest and church and pope, and even seem to make conscience superior to the Ten Commandments of God, a person hastily judging, might declare our doctrine dangerous, I am sure that all deliberate and accurate thinkers will understand that, on the contrary the supremacy and the independence of conscience involve most serious responsibilities. Conscience is not free in the sense of being wild and reckless and irresponsible. Noblesse oblige Nobility has its obligations. The higher the nature of man, the more exacting will be his judgment. The nobler his prerogatives the greater his moral responsibility. Conscience makes him like a God upon the earth, but in consequence he must walk the earth like a God.
In these days of mass thinking and mass action, when so many seem to think that "everybody's doing it" is a valid principle of moral conduct, and when, furthermore, there prevails the curious notion that private morality is one thing and public moralitv another, and that the two are essentially different, I feel that I cannot conclude a talk on conscience without a word on what I may call the public conscience.
It is a Christian and Catholic principle that no man is free to do for his country what he would not do in his private capacity as a man. We demand of the President and of every man in authority under our Government, of every diplomat and senator and congressman that, as far as he is concerned, he will direct the course of the nation as he would direct the course of his own individual action, strictly on principle, and in complete accordance with the dictates of, conscience. In other words, we believe and teach--that the basis of all governmental morality as well as of all personal morality is in the Ten Commandments.
A man must not steal, a nation must not steal. A man must not covet his neighbor's goods, a nation must not covet its neighbor's goods. A man must not lie. A nation must not lie. A diplomat must not lie for his country. A man must not bear false witness; a nation must not bear false witness. A man must not kill except in defense of his life, or the lives of his family or his neighbor; likewise with the same exceptions a nation must not kill.
Now these statements I know are commonplace. But they have been flatly contradicted by the action of diplomats in all countries and in all times. Of course, I would not be understood to say, except in the metaphorical sense, that a nation has a soul, and therefore a conscience. A nation may indeed be rewarded for its virtues and punished for its misdeeds. But the nation will not, as such, stand before the bar of Eternal Justice on the last day. We go to judgment one by one. Alone, we shall meet God alone. We shall not be swept into Heaven on the skirts of our country, any more than we shall be swept in on the skirts of our Church. In that dread moment which shall determine our everlasting destiny, we shall stand or fall---alone. This I take to be the most tremendous and magnificent, or, which may God forbid,---the most tragic consequence of our fidelity or our infidelity to conscience.