this innate guide and commandment, a quite sufficient warrant for all our distinctions of good and evil.  Honest men do not really differ in their moral judgments.  They may misunderstand one another’s concepts and engage in verbal disputes; but at bottom their moral sense approves and disapproves the same acts.  Our moral differences come mainly from the deluding effects of passion and the sophisticated ingenuities of the intellect.  We should “return to nature,” go by ourselves alone, and listen to the inner voice.  If we sincerely listen and obey we shall always do right. [Footnote:  “But truth and right, founded in the eternal and, is what every man can judge of, when laid before him.  ’T is necessarily one and the same to every man’s understanding, just as light is the same, to every man’s eyes.” (S.  Clarke, Discourse upon Natural Religion, 1706.)]

We cannot but recognize a certain amount of practical truth in this picture.  But it is over-simplified, and it is fundamentally unsatisfactory to the intellect.  We shall now pass in review its most obvious inadequacies.

Do the deliverances of different people’s consciences agree?

Nothing is more notorious to an unbiased observer than the conscientious differences between men.  Even among members of a single community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment.  And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground.  It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light.  Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral convictions as Christians have for theirs.  When we survey the vast amount of material amassed by anthropologists, we find that, as has been often said, there is hardly a vice that has not somewhere been deemed a virtue, and hardly a virtue but has been branded as a vice.  History is full of the pathos of havoc wrought by conscientious men, of foolish and ruinous acts which they have braced themselves to do for conscience’ sake.  One has but to think of the earnest and prayerful inquisitors and persecutors in the mediaeval Church, of the Puritans destroying the stained-glass windows and paintings of the Madonna, of the caliph who destroyed the great Alexandrian library, bereaving the world at one blow of that priceless culture-inheritance.  Written biography, fiction which truly represents life, and individual memory are full of conscience have sundered those who truly loved and wrought irremediable pain and loss.  Lately the newspapers told us of the heroic suicide of General Nogi and his wife, who felt it their duty not to survive their emperor.  To a Catholic Christian this imperious dictate of the Japanese conscience would be a deadly sin.  And so it goes.  There is no need to multiply instances of what can be observed on every hand.  Conscience reflects the traditions and influences amid which a man grows up.