(3) We must, however, be just.  The fact of the reliability of conscience, and the wisdom of following its guidance, holds over a wide range of human experience and the experience which is most apparent upon the surface.  For all ordinary cases we of Christendom agree without hesitation that murder is wrong, and lying, and stealing.  It seems a waste of time to try to justify our instinctive verdict, and the attempt would only be bewildering to most men.  It is only when brought face to face with some alien code that we see the need of digging below intuition.  A missionary to the South Seas may be confronted with men to whom the killing of other tribesmen and the accumulation of skulls is a glorious and honorable feat, or to whom skillful lying is an enviable and proud accomplishment.  But most of us live among neighbors whose conscience is comfortably like our own, and only occasionally become seriously perplexed.  In the great mass of everyday occasions we do know our duty intuitively, and we do agree with one another.  We recognize a duty at sight without realizing its teleology.  It is not, indeed, an innate faculty; it was acquired during our formative years; it is not infallible.  But the forces which have gone to the making of it are similar in all our lives, and the products are more alike than unlike.

(4) Finally, it is true that to obey conscience is, in a sense, to do right, to be moral, no matter how distorted conscience may be.  Conscientiousness is in itself a virtue.  To this point we shall later return.  We need only say here that conscientiousness is not enough.  Life is not so simple a matter as that.  We need judgment, sanity, insight, as well as a strong sense of duty.  We need to correct and train conscience, to adjust it to our real needs, to recognize that it is a means, not an end.

Our discussion, though rapid, should show that we cannot start with the “ought” of our conscience, or moral sense, and erect our moral theory upon that.  Conscience itself needs to be explained.  Its commands need to be justified by reference to some more ultimate criterion.  It needs to be pruned of its fanaticism, developed where it is weak, and kept in line with our growing insight into what is best in conduct.  Ruskin once summed the matter up by saying, “Obey thy conscience!  But first be sure it is not the conscience of an ass!” Conscience may be a very dangerous guide.  And even where it is normal and useful it must not be invested with any absolute and irrational authority.

Historical study, then, reveals the growth of personal and social morality through the action of forces, which tend to drive men into conduct that makes for their welfare more surely than did their primitive animal impulses.  Conscience arises through these same forces.  Though subject to perversion and infinitely variant in detail, community-morals and individual conscience have been the chief means of making man’s life safe and wisely directed.  The criterion that emerges from such a study is not, however, the bald existence of codes of morals, or of conscience, but the human welfare which those codes and that conscience exist to serve.  To an exposition of the ways in which morality serves and should increasingly serve human welfare, we now turn.