ogically," with knowledge." Living with or according to our highest knowledge. To be conscientious is to live up to our light. In this is the transformation of knowledge into character. Conscience does not furnish the evidence. It is the infallible judge which forever condemns the wrong and praises the right. It is man's guide through the dangerous and unknown country of temptation and sin. It is the compass which never fails on life's stormy sea.

O the tragical possibilities in man's relation to this supreme element in life, and character, and destiny! It may be "seared as with a hot iron;" it may be made to undergo such a process as to be stunted, and dwarfed, and withered, and the last drop of sap taken out of it. It may be made to lose its power to control and ennoble. This ruin is wrought within before it appears outwardly. Its beginning is not in the flesh or upon the surface; so all change for the better, and final redemption must come from the inner nature. That is the secret of the gospel. That is the meaning of the new birth. It is new direction; new impulse; new desire; in reality, new living. That is regeneration. That is the only salvation. Conscience must for

ever derive its vitality from God. Otherwise it goes down and creates moral darkness. Conscience dis

obeyed is will weakened. The power of resistance is less. Habit is formed and the propagation of evil goes on. If the sound of the alarm-clock is heeded when it first disturbs the sweetness of sleep, it is effective in its purpose, but if the eyes are again closed, the next morning there is less wakefulness, and, at last, that hated piece of machinery has lost all of its usefulness.

Only a few years ago Mr. Parnell was the great leader of the Irish cause in the English Parliament. He possessed a characteristic eloquence, and was master of great occasions. He was a leader with magnificent common-sense and royal bearing. He fought his way, step by step, until the greatest in the world respected him and the morning of victory began to dawn for his cause. Every man prophesied that he would live in history as one of the greatest of men. He was great enough, in 1882, to offer, of his own accord, to Mr. Gladstone, to retire from public life if such an act would be helpful to his people. But, on the threshold of his triumph, he began to trifle with and trample upon conscience. In his inner life this disobedience was first doing its

deadly work without the knowledge of his fellow men. He did not resist the wrong, and conscience was gnawing at the very vitals of his being and his success. In 1890 the cloak was unfastened and thrown back. Then Justin McCarthy, who had been his dearest friend, said of him: "He seems suddenly to have changed his whole nature and his very ways of speech. We knew him before as a man of superb self-restraint-cool, calculating, never carried from the moorings of his keen intellect by any waves of passion around him. A man with the eye and the foresight of a born commander-inchief. We have now, in our midst, a man seemingly incapable of self-control; a man ready at any moment, and on the smallest provocation, to break into a very tempest and whirlwind of passion. A man of the most reckless and self-contradictory statements. A man who could descend to the most trivial and vulgar personalities; who could engage, and even indulge, in the most ignoble and humiliating brawls." His star became a shooting-star, and fell forever from the world's sky. No foot ever stepped upon the sacred treasure of conscience with impunity.

Charles IX. of France in his youth was of a lov

ing and sensitive nature. His mother's training, so inhuman, had much to do with his sad transformation. Even when she first proposed to him the massacre of the Huguenots he shrank from it in horror and said, "No, no, madam; they are my loving subjects." If he had listened, in this critical moment, to the voice of conscience so that its demands could never have been forgotten, St. Bartholomew's night would never have made crimson the pages of history, and he would have escaped the agony and remorse of the dark hours about his death-bed. In the terror of the judgment and the memory of his bloody deeds, he cried to his physician as death demanded his soul: Asleep or awake, I see the mangled forms of the Huguenots passing before me. They drip with blood; they make hideous faces at me; they point to their open wounds and mock me. O that I had spared at least the little infants at the breast." Then he screamed and cried in his misery, while the bloody sweat oozed from the pores of his skin. He crushed that beautiful cluster of tender and pure impulses of the soul into the cup of remorse, and death pressed it to his lips and forced him to drain its very dregs.

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Every sin has its avenging angel, and it never deserts its duty. Men attempt to bury crime, but no grave is deep enough. Conscience never dies. It is oftentimes bruised and trampled upon, but never slain. It still cries out, "Do forever that which makes for holiness, and happiness, and heaven." It is permanent and universal; it is at the centre of being. It is safe from destruction. It is the echo of eternal law in the soul. It is like the atmosphere; it bears down upon a man out of heaven from every point of the compass and at every tick of the clock. Self-control and every element of divineness in us depends upon the ascendency of conscience. Conscience in the moral world is what gravity is in the physical world. You cannot ignore or get away from it, or live without it. It is not an accident in human life; it is elemental and essential.

Loyalty to conscience is the only foundation upon which character or manhood can be erected. If the other and upper stories are beautiful, sham in the hidden foundation will work ultimate ruin. To be a man is to despise all effort to silence the voice of God by failure to obey.

Socrates wrote no books, and did not leave his