properly acute, it would have made us stop.  Insight, however comprehensive and clear, is apt to remain somewhere in a locked drawer in our minds when the hot blooded impulse appears.  If we were but to pause and reflect, we should be sensible and kind.  But our intellect is dulled by our emotions, it does not get working.  We need a more instinctive, a deeper-rooted mechanism, an imperious “Halt!” at the brief moment between the thought of sin and the act.  Conscience is not only a teacher and a driver, it is a sentinel.  Its red flag stops us at the brink of many a disaster, and we have it to thank for many an otherwise forgotten duty performed.

To sum up:  Instinct and desire are lacking in proper adjustment to the needs of life.  Society seeks to control them by the pressure of law and custom.  These powerful forces, however, are external, and, savoring more or less of tyranny, tend at times to awaken a rebellious spirit in the hotheaded.  So a perpetual antinomy would exist between internal impulse and external constraint, were it not that that external constraint is reflected within the individual mind by a secondary and overlying set of inhibitions and promptings which we call variously the “moral sense,” the “sense of duty,” or “conscience.”  We often do not know or remember consciously at the moment of decision what the law ordains or the wisdom of the race teaches.  But we have an inward monitor.  We often hang back from a recognized duty.  But we feel an inward push.  When the wrong impulse is pungent and enticing, and the right one insipid and tame, when we would forget if we could the perils of sin, conscience surges up in us and saves us from ourselves.  It is a mechanism of extreme value, which nature has evolved in us for imposing on our weak and vacillating wills action that makes for a truer good than we should otherwise choose.  No wonder, then, if we reverence this saving power within us, and crown it with a halo as the divine spark in the midst of our grosser nature.  The more we revere it, the brighter the glamour it has for us, the stronger it grows and the more it helps us.  The apotheosis of conscience has been of immense use in leading men to heed its voice and obey its leading.  Yet this blind allegiance has its dangers; conscience has often been a cruel tyrant.  It is by no means an always-safe guide, as we shall presently note.  And as men grow more and more adjusted by instinct and training to their real needs, they will have less and less need of this helmsman.  After all, there is something wrong with a life that needs conscience; it is a transition help for the long period of man’s maladjustment.  Spencer looks forward, a little too hopefully, perhaps, to a time in the measurable future when we shall have outgrown the need of it, when we shall wish to do right and need no compulsion, outer or inner.  And Emerson, in a well known passage, writes:  “We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous.  When we