The first is sometimes known as a “rubber” conscience, on account of its capacity for stretching itself to meet the exigencies of a like or a dislike.

Laxity may be the effect of a simple illusion.  Men often do wrong unawares.  They excuse themselves with the plea:  “I did not know any better.”  But we are not here examining the acts that can be traced back to self-illusion; rather the state of persons who labor under the disability of seeing wrong anywhere, and who walk through the commandments of God and the Church with apparent unconcern.  What must we think of such people in face of the fact that they not only could, but should know better!  They are supposed to know their catechism.  Are there not Catholic books and publications of various sorts?  What about the Sunday instructions and sermons?  These are the means and opportunities, and they facilitate the fulfilment of what is in us a bounden duty to nourish our souls before they die of spiritual hunger.

A delicate, effeminate life, spiritual sloth, and criminal neglect are responsible for this kind of laxity.

This state of soul is also the inevitable consequence of long years passed in sin and neglect of prayer.  Habit blunts the keen edge of perception.  Evil is disquieting to a novice; but it does not look so bad after you have done it a while and get used to it.  Crimes thus become ordinary sins, and ordinary sins peccadillos.

Then again there are people who, like the Pharisees of old, strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.  They educate themselves up to a strict observance of all things insignificant.  They would not forget to say grace before and after meals, but would knife the neighbor’s character or soil their minds with all filthiness, without a scruple or a shadow of remorse.

These are they who walk in the broad way that leadeth to destruction.  In the first place, their conscience or the thing that does duty for a conscience, is false and they are responsible for it.  Then, this sort of a conscience is not habitually certain, and laxity consists precisely in contemning doubts and passing over lurking, lingering suspicions as not worthy of notice.  Lastly, it has not the quality of common prudence since the judgment it pronounces is not supported by plausible reasons.  Its character is dishonesty.

A scruple is a little sharp stone formerly used as a measure of weight.  Pharmacists always have scruples.  There is nothing so torturing as to walk with one or several of these pebbles in the shoe.  Spiritual scruples serve the same purpose for the conscience.  They torture and torment; they make devotion and prayer impossible, and blind the conscience; they weaken the mind, exhaust the bodily forces, and cause a disease that not infrequently comes to a climax in despair or insanity.

A scrupulous conscience is not to be followed as a standard of right and wrong, because it is unreasonable.  In its final analysis it is not certain, but doubtful and improbable, and is influenced by the most futile reasons.  It is lawful, it is even necessary, to refuse assent to the dictates of such a conscience.  To persons thus afflicted the authoritative need of a prudent adviser must serve as a rule until the conscience is cured of its morbid and erratic tendencies.