Conscience!  Conscience!  Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God!  In thee consists the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts—­nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle.

Thank heaven we have now got rid of all that alarming show of philosophy; we may be men without being scholars; now that we need not spend our life in the study of morality, we have found a less costly and surer guide through this vast labyrinth of human thought.  But it is not enough to be aware that there is such a guide; we must know her and follow her.  If she speaks to all hearts, how is it that so few give heed to her voice?  She speaks to us in the language of nature, and everything leads us to forget that tongue.  Conscience is timid, she loves peace and retirement; she is startled by noise and numbers; the prejudices from which she is said to arise are her worst enemies.  She flees before them or she is silent; their noisy voices drown her words, so that she cannot get a hearing; fanaticism dares to counterfeit her voice and to inspire crimes in her name.  She is discouraged by ill-treatment; she no longer speaks to us, no longer answers to our call; when she has been scorned so long, it is as hard to recall her as it was to banish her.

How often in the course of my inquiries have I grown weary of my own coldness of heart!  How often have grief and weariness poured their poison into my first meditations and made them hateful to me!  My barren heart yielded nothing but a feeble zeal and a lukewarm love of truth.  I said to myself:  Why should I strive to find what does not exist?  Moral good is a dream, the pleasures of sense are the only real good.  When once we have lost the taste for the pleasures of the soul, how hard it is to recover it!  How much more difficult to acquire it if we have never possessed it!  If there were any man so wretched as never to have done anything all his life long which he could remember with pleasure, and which would make him glad to have lived, that man would be incapable of self-knowledge, and for want of knowledge of goodness, of which his nature is capable, he would be constrained to remain in his wickedness and would be for ever miserable.  But do you think there is any one man upon earth so depraved that he has never yielded to the temptation of well-doing?  This temptation is so natural, so pleasant, that it is impossible always to resist it; and the thought of the pleasure it has once afforded is enough to recall it constantly to our memory.  Unluckily it is hard at first to find satisfaction for it; we have any number of reasons for refusing to follow the inclinations of our heart; prudence, so called, restricts