But it is not so with the human will.  This is not a rigid and stationary faculty.  It is capable of turning this way, and that way.  It was created holy, and it turned from holiness to sin, in Adam’s apostasy.  And now, under the operation of the Divine Spirit, it turns back again, it converts from sin to holiness.  The will of man is thus capable of two courses of action, while his conscience is capable of only one judgment; and hence he can see and approve the right, yet love and practise the wrong.  If a man’s conscience changed along with his heart and his will, so that when he began to love and practise sin, he at the same time began to approve of sin, the case would be different.  If, when Adam apostatised from God, his conscience at that moment began to take sides with his sin, instead of condemning it, then, indeed, neither Ovid, nor Horace, nor Rousseau, nor any other one of Adam’s posterity, would have been able to say:  “I see the right and approve of it, while I follow the wrong.”  But it was not so.  After apostasy, the conscience of Adam passed the same judgment upon sin that it did before.  Adam heard its terrible voice speaking in concert with the voice of God, and hid himself.  He never succeeded in bringing his conscience over to the side of his heart and will, and neither has any one of his posterity.  It is impossible to do this.  Satan himself, after millenniums of sin, still finds that his conscience, that the accusing and condemning law written on the heart, is too strong for him to alter, too rigid for him to bend.  The utmost that either he, or any creature, can do, is to drown its verdict for a time in other sounds, only to hear the thunder-tones again, waxing longer and louder like the trumpet of Sinai.

Having thus briefly shown that the approbation of goodness is not the love of it, we proceed to draw some conclusions from the truth.

1.  In the first place, it follows from this subject, that the mere workings of conscience are no proof of holiness.  When, after the commission of a wrong act, the soul of a man is filled with self-reproach, he must not take it for granted that this is the stirring of a better nature within him, and is indicative of some remains of original righteousness.  This reaction of conscience against his disobedience of law is as necessary, and unavoidable, as the action of his eyelids under the blaze of noon, and is worthy neither of praise nor blame, so far as he is concerned.  It does not imply any love for holiness, or any hatred of sin.  Nay, it may exist without any sorrow for sin, as in the instance of the hardened transgressor who writhes under its awful power, but never sheds a penitential tear, or sends up a sigh for mercy.  The distinction between the human conscience, and the human heart, is as wide as between the human intellect, and the human heart.[2] We never think of confounding the functions and operations of the understanding with