Conscience

Is that faculty common to all free moral agents, 1Ch 2:13-15, in virtue of which we discern between right and wrong, and are prompted to choose the former and refuse the latter. Its appointed sphere is in the regulation, according to the will of God revealed in nature and the Bible, of all our being and actions so far as these have a moral character. The existence of this faculty proves the soul accountable at the bar of its Creator, and its voice is in an important sense the voice of God. We feel that when pure and fully informed, it is an unerring guide to duty, and that no possible array of inducements can justify us in disregarding it. In man, however, though this conviction that we must do what is right never fails, yet the value of conscience is greatly impaired by its inhering in a depraved soul, whose evil tendencies warp and pervert our judgment on all subjects. Thus Paul verily thought that he ought to persecute the followers of Christ, Mal 26:9 . His sin was in his culpable neglect to enlighten his conscience by all the means in his power, and to purify it by divine grace. A terrible array of conscientious errors and persecutions, which have infested and afflicted the church in all ages, warns us of our individual need of perfect light and sanctifying grace. A “good” and “pure” conscience, 1Ti 1:5 3:9, is sprinkled with Christ’s blood, clearly discerns the will of God, and urges us to obey it from the gospel motives; in proportion as we thus obey it, it is “void of offence,” Mal 24:16, and its approbation is one of the most essential elements of happiness. A “weak,” or irresolute and blind conscience, 1Co 8:7 ; a “defiled” conscience, the slave of a corrupt heart, Tit 1:15 Heb 10:22 ; and a “seared” conscience, 1Ti 4:2, hardened against the law and the gospel alike, unless changed by grace, will at length become an avenging conscience, the instrument of a fearful and eternal remorse. No bodily tortures can equal the agony it inflicts; and though it may slumber here, it will hereafter be like the worm that never dies and the fire that never can be quenched.

Fuente: American Tract Society Bible Dictionary

Conscience

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1. The word and its history.-Both the Lat. conscientia, from which conscience is derived, and the Gr. , of which it is the invariable rendering in the NT, have originally the more general meaning of consciousness-the knowledge of any mental state. Down to the 17th cent., as the Authorized Version itself bears witness, conscience too was sometimes used in this wider sense. In 1Co 8:7 conscience of the idol, and in Heb 10:2 conscience of sins, would now be better rendered consciousness. Some exegetes would prefer consciousness to conscience in 1Pe 2:19 conscience toward (or of) God. With these exceptions, conscience in the NT denotes not consciousness generally, but the moral faculty in particular-that power by which we apprehend moral truth and recognize it as having the authority of moral law. The history of the words conscience, conscientia, , shows that it is entirely fanciful to suppose on etymological grounds that the prefixes con and point to the subjects joint knowledge along with God Himself. The joint knowledge denoted is knowledge with oneself, a self-knowledge or self-consciousness in which the inner I comes forward as a witness. This does not, of course, exclude the further view that, as man is made in the image of God, and as his individual personality is rooted in that of the absolute moral Ruler, the testimony of conscience actually is the voice of God bearing witness in the soul to the reality and authority of moral truth.

It is a significant fact that the word conscience is nowhere found in the OT text, though in Ecc 10:20 both Authorized Version and Revised Version give it in the margin as an alternative for thought, to represent the Heb. , which Septuagint here renders by . In ancient Israel it was an external law, not an inward lawgiver, that held the seat of authority; and though the prophets addressed their appeals to the moral sense of their hearers (cf. Mic 6:8), they furnished no doctrine of conscience. Nor does the word occur either in the Synoptics or the Fourth Gospel; for the clause of Joh 8:9 where it is found does not belong to the correct text (see Revised Version ). Jesus in His teaching constantly addresses Himself to the conscience, and clearly refers to it when He speaks of the light that is in thee (Mat 6:23, Luk 11:35), but His mission was to illumine and quicken the moral faculty by the revelation He brought, not to analyze it, or define it, or lay down a doctrine on the subject. In the Acts and Epistles, however, the effects of the revelation in Christ become apparent. We have the word conscience 31 times in Authorized Version and 30 times in Revised Version -the latter reading for in 1Co 8:7. Heb. has it 5 times and 1 Pet. thrice; with these exceptions it is a Pauline word. There are anticipations of the NT use of it in the Apocrypha (Wis 17:11, Sir 14:2, 2Ma 6:11), and suggestions for St. Pauls treatment of it in contemporary Greek teaching, and especially in the moral philosophy of the Stoics. But it was Christian faith that raised it out of the region of ethical abstraction and set it on a throne of living power.

2. The NT doctrine

(1) The nature of conscience.-According to its etymology, conscience is a strictly cognitive power-the power of apprehending moral truth; and writers of the intuitional school frequently restrict the use of the term to this one meaning (cf. Calderwood, Handbook of Moral Philosophy, p. 78). Popularly, however, conscience has a much wider connotation, including moral judgments and moral feelings as well as immediate intuitions of right and wrong; and it is evident that in the NT the word is employed in this larger sense so as to include the whole of the moral nature. When conscience is said to bear witness (Rom 2:15; Rom 9:1) or to give testimony (2Co 1:12), it is the clear and direct shining of the inner light that is referred to. When it is described as weak or over-scrupulous (1Co 8:7; 1Co 8:10; 1Co 8:12), and is contrasted by implication with a conscience that is strong and walks at liberty, the reference is to those diversities of opinion on moral subjects which are due to variations of judgment in the application of mutually acknowledged first principles. When it is spoken of on the one hand as good (1Ti 1:5; 1Ti 1:19, Heb 13:18, 1Pe 3:16; 1Pe 3:21) or void of offence toward God and men (Act 24:16), and on the other as defiled (1Co 8:7), wounded (1Co 8:12), evil (Heb 10:22), seared (or branded) with a hot iron (1Ti 4:2), the writers are thinking of those pleasant or painful moral feelings which follow upon obedience or disobedience to moral law, or of that deadness to all feeling which falls upon those who have persistently shut their ears to the inward voice and turned the light that is in them into darkness.

The fundamental passage for the Pauline doctrine is Rom 2:14-15. The Apostle here seems to lay down as unquestionable, (a) that there is a Divine law written by Nature on the heart of every man, whether Jew or Gentile; (b) that conscience is the moral faculty which bears witness to that law; (c) that in the light of that witness there is an exercise of the thoughts or reasonings (), in other words, of the moral judgment; (d) that, as the result of this judgment before the inward bar, men are subject to the feelings of moral self-approval or self-reproach. Covering in this passage the whole ground of the moral nature of man, St. Paul appears to distinguish conscience as the witness-bearing faculty from the moral judgments and moral feelings that accompany its testimony. But elsewhere, as has been already shown, he frequently speaks of conscience in that larger sense which makes it correspond not only with the immediate apprehension of moral truth, but with the judgments based upon the truth thus revealed, and the sentiments of satisfaction or dissatisfaction to which these judgments give rise.

(2) The authority of conscience.-However men differ in their theories as to the nature and origin of the moral faculty, there is general agreement as to the authority of the moral law which it enjoins. Few will be found to challenge Butlers famous assertion of the supremacy of conscience: Had it strength as it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world (Serm. ii.). And while adherents of the sensational school of ethics may dispute Kants right to describe the imperative of morality as categorical in its nature (Metaphysic of Ethics, p. 31), even they will not seek to qualify his apostrophe to duty (p. 120) or the exalted language in which he describes the solemn majesty of the Moral Law (p. 108). For the NT authors conscience is supreme, and it is supreme because in its very nature it is an organ through which God speaks to reveal His will. In the case of the natural man it testifies to a Divine law which is written on the heart (Rom 2:15); in the case of the Christian man this law of Nature is reinforced by a vital union with Jesus Christ (Gal 2:20) and by the assenting witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom 9:1). The claim of right which Butler makes on behalf of conscience is transformed for St. Paul into a law of power. The pure and loyal Christian conscience has might as it has right; it not only legislates but governs. What the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, is actually fulfilled in those who take Christ to be the companion of their conscience and who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit.

In Acts we have many examples of the way in which conscience, in Butlers words, magisterially exerts itself in the case alike of bad men and of good. The suicide of Judas (Act 1:18; cf. Mat 27:3 ff.), the heart-pricks of the men of Jerusalem under St. Peters preaching (Act 2:37), the claim of St. Peter and St. John that they must obey God rather than men (Act 4:19; Act 5:29), Sauls experience that it was hard to kick against the pricks (Act 9:5), Felix trembling as St. Paul reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come (Act 24:25)-all these are examples of the authority of conscience. And what in Acts we see practically exemplified is laid down in the Epistles as a matter of rule and doctrine. St. Paul enjoins submission to the civil authority (Rom 13:1 ff.), but vindicates its right to govern on the ground of the higher authority of conscience (Rom 13:5). The writer of Heb. represents the sin-convicting conscience as a sovereign power which impelled men to lay their gifts and sacrifices on the altar, but was never satisfied until Jesus Christ through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God (Heb 9:9; Heb 9:14; Heb 10:2; Heb 10:22). St. Peter teaches that, in a matter of conscience before God, men must be willing to endure griefs, suffering wrongfully (1Pe 2:19). Nor is it only the personal conscience whose dignity and supremacy must be acknowledged; a like reverence is to be shown for the conscience of others. St. Paul sought to commend himself to every mans conscience in the sight of God (2Co 4:2; cf. 2Co 5:11). He taught that the exercise of Christian liberty must be Limited by regard for anothers conscience (1Co 10:29), and that even when that conscience is weak, it must not be wounded or bewildered or defiled (1Co 8:7; 1Co 8:10; 1Co 8:12) lest the others sense of moral responsibility should thereby be impaired.

The source of this, magisterial authority of conscience is represented by the NT writers as lying altogether in the Divine will, of which conscience is the instrument. For St. Paul conscience is not an individualized reflexion of social opinion, nor a subtle compound of feelings evolved in the course of the long struggle for existence, nor yet a mysterious faculty that claims to regulate the life of man by virtue of some right inherent in its own nature. Its authority is that of a judge, who sits on the bench as the representative of a law that is higher than himself. Its function is to bear witness to the law of God (Rom 2:15; Rom 9:1, 2Co 1:12); its commendation is a commendation in His sight (2Co 4:2); its accusation is an anticipation of the day when He shall judge the secrets of men (Rom 2:15-16). Similarly for St. Peter a matter of conscience is a question of conscience toward God (1Pe 2:19). Some commentators would render in this verse by consciousness of God; and the very ambiguity of the expression may suggest that in the Apostles view conscience is really a God-consciousness in the sphere of morality, as faith is a God-consciousness in the sphere of religion.

(3) Varieties of conscience.-What has just been said as to the absolute and universal authority of conscience may seem difficult to reconcile with the distinctions made by the NT writers between consciences of very varied types. There are consciences that are weak and timid, and others that are strong and free (1Co 8:7 ff.). A conscience may be void of offence (Act 24:16), or it may be defiled and wounded (1Co 8:7; 1Co 8:12, Tit 1:15). It may be good (1Ti 1:5; 1Ti 1:19, Heb 13:18, 1Pe 3:16; 1Pe 3:21), or it may be evil (Heb 10:22). It may be pure (1Ti 3:9, 2Ti 1:3), or in need of cleansing (Heb 9:14). It may possess that clear moral sense which discerns intuitively both good and evil (Heb 5:14), or it may be seared with a hot iron (1Ti 4:2) and condemned to that judicial blindness to which nothing is pure (Tit 1:15). The explanation of the difficulties raised by such language lies in the fact already noted that conscience in the NT is used to denote not the power of moral vision only, but the moral judgment and the moral feelings. As the organ which discerns the Moral Law, conscience has the authority of that law itself; its voice is the voice of God. It leaves us in no doubt as to the reality of moral distinctions; it assures as that right is right and wrong is wrong, and that to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin (Jam 4:17). But for the application to particular cases of the general law of duty thus revealed, men must depend upon their moral judgments; and moral judgments are liable to error just as other judgments are. It was a want of knowledge that led some in the Corinthian Church to shrink from eating meat that had been offered to an idol (1Co 8:7), and a consequent mistake of judgment when they came to the conclusion that such eating was wrong. Their consciences were weak because their moral judgments were weak. And as the result of their weakness in the decision of moral questions, their moral feelings were misdirected, and so their consciences were stained and wounded by acts in which a man of more enlightened conscience saw no harm. Similarly, when a conscience is said to be good or pure or void of offence, the reference is to the sense of peace and moral harmony with God and man which comes to one who has loyally obeyed the dictates of the Moral Law; while an uncleansed or evil conscience is one on which there rests the burden and pain of sin that is unatoned for and unforgiven. A seared or branded conscience, again, may point to the case of those in whom abuse of the moral nature has led to a perversion of the moral judgment and a deadening of the moral sentiments. Compare what St. Paul says of those whose understanding is darkened, whose hearts are hardened, and who are now past feeling (Eph 4:18).

(4) The education of conscience.-Some intuitionalists have held that conscience, being an infallible oracle, is incapable of education; and Kants famous utterance, An erring conscience is a chimera (op. cit. p. 206), has often been quoted in this connexion. But it is only in a theoretical and ideal sense that the truth of the saying can be admitted-only when the word of conscience is taken to be nothing less and nothing more than the voice of God, and its light to be in very reality His revealing and appealing look (J. Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion3, London, 1891, p. 71). In the NT, however, as in general usage, conscience is not restricted to the intuitive discernment of the difference between right and wrong, but is applied to the whole moral nature of man; and when understood in this way there can be no question that it shares in the general weakness of human nature, and that it is both capable of education and constantly in need of an educative discipline. The distinction made by the NT writers between a good and an evil conscience implies the need of education; their moral precepts imply its possibility. St. Paul says that be exercised himself to have a conscience void of offence toward God and men (Act 24:16); the author of Heb. speaks of those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil (Heb 5:14).

In various aspects the necessity for this exercise or training of the moral faculty comes before us. Even as a power of intuition or vision by which the Moral Law is discerned, conscience is capable of improvement. Ignorance darkens it (Eph 4:18), sin defiles it (Tit 1:15); and only an eye that is purged and enlightened can see clearly. My conscience is nott so, said Queen Mary to Knox. Conscience, Madam, he replied, requyres knowledge; and I fear that rycht knowledge ye have none (Knox, Works, ed. Laing, Edinburgh, 1864, ii. 283). But conscience is also a faculty of moral judgment, and in moral matters, as in other matters, human judgments go astray. The weak conscience is the natural accompaniment of the weak and narrow mind (1Co 8:7); a selfish and impure heart usually compounds with its conscience for the sins to which it is inclined, and a conscience that accepts hush-money is apt to grow dumb until contact with another conscience stronger and purer than itself makes it vocal once more (Act 24:25). Moral sentiments, again, gather around a false judgment as readily as around a true. Christs apostles were killed by men who thought that they were thereby doing God service (Joh 16:2), and St. Paul himself once believed it to be his duty to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth (Act 26:9). In such cases persecution to the death carried no self-reproach with it, but a sense of moral complacency.

Granting, then, that conscience needs to be educated, how, according to the NT, is the work to be done? Three ways are especially suggested-the ways of knowledge, obedience, and love; in other words, the way of the mind, the way of the will, and the way of the heart. (a) Knox said to Queen Mary that conscience requires knowledge; and that is what St. Paul also taught (1Co 8:7). Before the man of God can be furnished completely unto every good work he has need of instruction in righteousness (2Ti 3:16-17). Education of this kind can be obtained from many masters, but the best teachers of all are Scriptures Inspired of God (ib.). St. Pauls own Epistles are full of instruction as regards both the broad principles of Christian ethics and their application under varying circumstances to all the details of personal, family, and social life. And in the teaching of Christ Himself, above all in that Sermon on the Mount whose echoes are heard so frequently in the Epistle of James, enlightenment comes to the human conscience through the revelation of the fundamental laws of the Divine Kingdom.

(b) Conscience is educated, in the next place, by obedience to the Divine law when that law is recognized. It is the use of knowledge already possessed that exercises the senses to keener moral discernment (Heb 5:14); it is the man who is willing to do Gods will who comes to know the Divine voice whenever he hears it (Joh 7:17). The ethics of the NT are not the ingenious elaboration of a beautiful but abstract moral scheme; they are practical through and through. Christians are called upon to acknowledge not the right of conscience only, but its might; they are commanded everywhere to bring their dispositions, desires, passions, and habits into captivity to its obedience. To follow Christ is to have the light of life (Joh 8:12); while to hate ones brother is to walk in darkness with blinded eyes, and so to lose the knowledge of the way (1Jn 2:11; cf. Joh 12:35). Obedience, in short, is the organ of spiritual knowledge (cf. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 2nd ser., new ed., London, 1875, no. viii.). A good conscience goes with a pure heart (1Ti 1:5). But sin so perverts and blinds the inward eye that the very light that is in us is darkness (Mat 6:23).

(c) But something more is required before the education of conscience is complete. Knowledge is much, and the will to obedience is more, but what if the power of love be wanting? In that case the conscience will not be void of offence toward God and men. According to the NT writers the conscience must be set free by being delivered from the sense of guilt through the atoning power of Christs sacrifice (Heb 9:14; Heb 10:22); it must learn its close dependence upon the mystery of faith (1Ti 3:9; cf. 1Ti 1:19); it must be taught that love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned are the end of the charge and the fulfilling of the law (1Ti 1:5). To be perfectly educated, in short, a conscience must experience the constraining and transforming power of the love of Christ, in whom men are new creatures, so that old things are passed away and all things are become new (2Co 5:14; 2Co 5:17). Thus, in the view of the NT writers, ethics passes into religion, and the Christian conscience is the conscience of one who lives the life of faith and love, and who can say with St. Paul, I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me (Gal 2:20).

Literature.-J. Butler, Analogy and Sermons, London, 1852, Sermons. ii. iii.; I. Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, Eng. translation , 1869, p. 245ff.; T. H. Green, prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford, 1883, p. 342ff.; H. Calderwood, Handbook of Moral Philosophy, London, 1872, pt. i.; H, Martensen, Christian Ethics, Edinburgh, 1881-82, i. 356ff.; Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, do. 1892, index s.v.; Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) , article Conscience; Realencyklopdie fr protestantische Theologie und Kirche 3, article Gewissen; B. Weiss, NT Theol., Eng. translation , Edinburgh. 1882-83, i. 476, ii. 40, 211.

J. C. Lambert.

Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church

CONSCIENCE

Signifies knowledge in conjunction; that is, in conjunction with the fact to which it is a witness, as the eye is to the action done before it; or, as South observes, it is a double or joint knowledge, namely, one of a divine law or rule, and the other of a man’s own action. It may be defined to be the judgment which a man passes on the morality of his actions as to their purity or turpitude; or the secret testimony of the soul, whereby it approves things that are good, and condemns those that are evil. Some object to its being called an act, habit, or faculty. An act, say they, would be represented as an agent, whereas conscience is a testimony. To say it is a habit, is to speak of it as a disposition acting, which is scarce more accurate than ascribing one act to another; and, besides, it would be strange language to say that conscience itself is a habit. Against defining it by the name of a power or faculty, it is objected, that it occasions a false notion of it, as a distinct power from reason. The rules of conscience. We must distinguish between a rule that of itself and immediately binds the conscience, and a rule that is occasionally of use to direct and satisfy the conscience.

Now in the first sense the will of God is the only rule immediately binding the conscience. No one has authority over the conscience but God. All penal laws, therefore, in matters of mere conscience, or things that do not evidently affect the civil state, are certainly unlawful; yet, secondly, the commands of superiors, not only natural parents, but civil, as magistrates or masters, and every man’s private engagements, are rules of conscience in things indifferent.

3. The examples of wise and good men may become rules of conscience: but here it must be observed, that no example or judgment is of any authority against law: where the law is doubtful, and even where there is no doubt, the side of example cannot be taken till enquiry has been first made concerning what the law directs.

Conscience has been considered, as,

1. Natural, or that common principle which instructs men of all countries and religions in the duties to which they are all alike obliged. There seems to be something of this in the minds of all men. Even in the darkest regions of the earth, and among the rudest tribes of men, a distinction has ever been made between just and unjust, a duty, and a crime.

2. A right conscience is that which decides aright, or, according to the only rule of rectitude, the law of God. This is also called a well-informed conscience, which in all its decisions proceeds upon the most evident principles of truth.

3. A probable conscience is that which, in cases which admit of the brightest and fullest light, contents itself with bare probabilities. The consciences of many are of no higher character; and though we must not say a man cannot be saved with such a conscience, yet such a conscience is not so perfect as it might be.

4. An ignorant conscience is that which may declare right, but, as it were, by chance, and without any just ground to build on.

5. An erroneous conscience is a conscience mistaken in its decisions about the nature of actions.

6. A doubting conscience is a conscience unresolved about the nature of actions; on account of the equal or nearly equal probabilities which appear for and against each side of the question.

7. Of an evil conscience there are several kinds. Conscience, in regard to actions in general, is evil when it has lost more or less the sense it ought to have of the natural distinctions of moral good and evil: this is a polluted or defiled conscience. Conscience is evil in itself when it gives either none or a false testimony as to past actions; when reflecting upon wickedness it feels no pains, it is evil, and said to be seared or hardened, 1Ti 4:2. It is also evil when during the commission of sin it lies quiet.

In regard to future actions, conscience is evil if it does not startle at the proposal of sin, or connives at the commission of it. For the right management of conscience, we should,

1. Endeavour to obtain acquaintance with the law of God, and with our own tempers and lives, and frequently compare them together.

2. Furnish conscience with general principles of the most extensive nature and strongest influence; such as the supreme love of God; love to our neighbours as ourselves; and that the care of our souls is of the greatest importance.

3. Preserve the purity of conscience.

4. Maintain the freedom of conscience, particularly against interest, passion, temper, example, and the authority of great names.

5. We should accustom ourselves to cool reflections on our past actions.

See Grove’s and Paley’s Moral Philosophy; South’s Sermons, vol. 2: sermon 12; and books under CASUISTRY.

Fuente: Theological Dictionary

conscience

(Latin: conscientia, knowledge of one’s self)

(1) The immediate intellectual perception a person has of his own existence and actions. The more common term for this is consciousness.

(2) A judgment of the intellect, dictating what is to be done as morally right, or what is to be avoided as morally wrong, in the particular circumstances in, which one is now placed.

Conscience is an act of the virtue of prudence. In that it is concerned with the morality of a particular case, conscience differs from a knowledge of the fundamental principles of right and wrong (synderesis), and from the understanding of their general conclusions (moral science). Conscience is said to be certain when it dictates something as right or as wrong, without experiencing any reasonable fear of the opposite being true. It is doubtful when it is undecided which of two contradictory views is true. A fundamental law of ethics decrees that a person is never allowed to act with a doubtful conscience. This means that one who seriously doubts the lawfulness of some action and nevertheless performs it, commits sin. The same is true of one who doubts whether it is permissible to omit some action, and yet omits it. One who is in such a state of doubt and wishes to perform (or to omit, as the case may be) the action in question should first obtain certainty of conscience. When strict certainty cannot be obtained, it is sufficient to have moral certainty in the broad sense, viz., that which is based on arguments of probability. All Catholic theologians admit this principle, although there is a variety of views as to how much probability in favor of liberty is required in order that a person may licitly abstain from obeying a law that probably binds him.

Conscience is true when its dictate as to what is right or wrong is correct; erroneous, when it judges what is really wrong as right, or vice versa. The prescriptions and the prohibitions of a conscience that is invincibly erroneous must be followed. In other words, when a person in good faith judges erroneously that he is obliged to perform or to omit a certain act, then he commits sin if he fails to perform or to omit it, as the case may be. For the light of his own reason constitutes for every individual the ultimate subjective norm of his conduct; and God’s rewards or punishments are meted out to every one, according as he has obeyed or disobeyed the voice of his own conscience. Conscience is sometimes taken in a broader sense to signify the knowledge and the remembrance a person has of the right or wrong of his past actions. In this sense we speak of the examination of conscience.

Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary

Conscience

I. THE NAME

In English we have done with a Latin word what neither the Latins nor the French have done: we have doubled the term, making “conscience” stand for the moral department and leaving “consciousness” for the universal field of objects about which we become aware. In Cicero we have to depend upon the context for the specific limitation to the ethical area, as in the sentence: “mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo” (Att., XII, xxviii, 2). Sir W. Hamilton has discussed how far we can be said to be conscious of the outer objects which we know, and how far “consciousness” ought to be held a term restricted to states of self or self-consciousness. (See Thiele, Die Philosophie des Selbstbewusstseins, Berlin, 1895.) In the two words Bewusstsein and Gewissen the Germans have made a serviceable distinction answering to our “consciousness” and “conscience”. The ancients mostly neglected such a discrimination. The Greeks often used phronesis where we should use “conscience”, but the two terms are far from coincident. They also used suneidesis, which occurs repeatedly for the purpose in hand both in the Old and the New Testament. The Hebrews had no formal psychology, though Delitzsch has endeavoured to find one in Scripture. There the heart often stands for conscience.

II. ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE IN THE RACE AND IN THE INDIVIDUAL

Of anthropologists some do and some do not accept the Biblical account of man’s origin; and the former class, admitting that Adam’s descendants might soon have lost the traces of their higher descent, are willing to hear, with no pledge of endorsing, what the latter class have to say on the assumption of the human development even from an animal ancestry, and on the further assumption that in the use of evidences they may neglect sequence of time and place. It is not maintained by any serious student that the Darwinian pedigree is certainly accurate: it has the value of a diagram giving some notion of the lines along which forces are supposed to have acted. Not, then, as accepting for fact, but as using it for a very limited purpose, we may give a characteristic sketch of ethical development as suggested in the last chapter of Dr. L. T. Hobhouse’s “Morals in Evolution”. It is a conjectural story, very like what other anthropologists offer for what it is worth and not for fully certified science.

Ethics is conduct or regulated life; and regulation has a crude beginning in the lowest animal life as a response to stimulus, as reflex action, as useful adaptation to environment. Thus the amoeba doubles itself round its food in the water and lives; it propagates by self-division. At another stage in the animal series we find blind impulses for the benefit of life and its propagation taking a more complex shape, until something like instinctive purpose is displayed. Useful actions are performed, not apparently pleasurable in themselves, yet with good in the sequel which cannot have been foreseen. The care of the animal for its young, the provision for the need of its future offspring is a kind of foreshadowed sense of duty. St. Thomas is bold to follow the terminology of Roman lawyers, and to assert a sort of morality in the pairing and the propagating of the higher animals: “ius naturale est quod natura omnia animalia docuit”. (It is the natural law which nature has taught all animals.–“In IV Sent.”, dist. xxxiii, a. 1, art. 4.) Customs are formed under the pressures and the interactions of actual living. they are fixed by heredity, and they await the analysis and the improvements of nascent reason. With the advent of man, in his rudest state–however he came to be in that state, whether by ascent or descent–there dawns a conscience, which, in the development theory, will have to pass through many stages. At first its categories of right and wrong are in a very fluid condition, keeping no fixed form, and easily intermixing, as in the chaos of a child’s dreams, fancies, illusions, and fictions. The requirements of social life, which becomes the great moralizer of social action, are continually changing, and with them ethics varies its adaptations. As society advances, its ethics improves. “The lines on which custom is formed are determined in each society by the pressures, the thousand interactions of those forces of individual character and social relationship, which never cease remoulding until they have made men’s loves and hates, their hopes and fears for themselves and their children, their dread of unseen agencies, their jealousies, their resentments, their antipathies, their sociability and dim sense of mutual dependence all their qualities good and bad, selfish and sympathetic, social and anti-social.” (Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 262.) The grasp of experience widens and power of analysis increases, till, in a people like the Greeks, we come upon thinkers who can distinctly reflect on human conduct, and can put in practice the gnothi seauton (know thyself), so that henceforth the method of ethics is secured for all times, with indefinite scope left for its better and better application. “Here we have reached the level of philosophical or spiritual religions, systems which seek to concentrate all experience in one focus, and to illuminate all morality from one centre, thought, as ever, becoming more comprehensive as it becomes more explicit”. (ibid., p. 266.)

What is said of the race is applied to the individual, as in him customary rules acquire ethical character by the recognition of distinct principles and ideals, all tending to a final unity or goal, which for the mere evolutionist is left very indeterminate, but for the Christian has adequate definition in a perfect possession of God by knowledge and love, without the contingency of further lapses from duty. To come to the fullness of knowledge possible in this world is for the individual a process of growth. The brain at first has not the organization which would enable it to be the instrument of rational thought: probably it is a necessity of our mind’s nature that we should not start with the fully formed brain but that the first elements of knowledge should be gathered with the gradations of the developing structure. In the morally good family the child slowly learns right conduct by imitation, by instruction, by sanction in the way of rewards and punishments. Bain exaggerates the predominance of the last named element as the source whence the sense of obligation comes, and therein he is like Shaftesbury (Inquiry, II, n. 1), who sees in conscience only the reprover. This view is favoured also by Carlyle in his “Essay on Characteristics”, and by Dr. Mackenzie in his “Manual of Ethics” (3rd ed., III, 14), where we read: “I should prefer to say simply that conscience is a feeling of pain accompanying and resulting from our non-conformity to principle.” Newman also has put the stress on the reproving office of conscience. Carlyle says we should not observe that we had a conscience if we had never offended. Green thinks that ethical theory is mostly of negative use for conduct. (Prolegomena to Ethics, IV, 1.) It is better to keep in view both sides of the truth and say that the mind ethically developed comes to a sense of satisfaction in right doing and of dissatisfaction in wrongdoing, and that the rewards and the punishments judiciously assigned to the young have for their purpose, as Aristotle puts it, to teach the teachable how to find pleasure in what ought to please and displeasure in what ought to displease. The immature mind must be given external sanctions before it can reach the inward. Its earliest glimmering of duty cannot be clear light: it begins by distinguishing conduct as nice or as nasty and naughty: as approved or disapproved by parents and teachers, behind whom in a dim way stands the oft-mentioned God, conceived, not only in an anthropomorphic, but in a nepiomorphic way, not correct yet more correct than Caliban’s speculations about Setebos. The perception of sin in the genuine sense is gradually formed until the age which we roughly designate as the seventh year, and henceforth the agent enters upon the awful career of responsibility according to the dictates of conscience. On grounds not ethical but scholastically theological, St. Thomas explains a theory that the unbaptized person at the dawn of reason goes through a first crisis in moral discrimination which turns simply on the acceptance or rejection of God, and entails mortal sin in case of failure. (I-II:89:6)

III. WHAT CONSCIENCE IS IN THE SOUL OF MAN?

It is often a good maxim not to mind for a time how a thing came to be, but to see what it actually is. To do so in regard to conscience before we take up the history of philosophy in its regard is wise policy, for it will give us some clear doctrine upon which to lay hold, while we travel through a region perplexed by much confusion of thought. The following points are cardinal: The natural conscience is no distinct faculty, but the one intellect of a man inasmuch as it considers right and wrong in conduct, aided meanwhile by a good will, by the use of the emotions, by the practical experience of living, and by all external helps that are to the purpose. The natural conscience of the Christian is known by him to act not alone, but under the enlightenment and the impulse derived from revelation and grace in a strictly supernatural order. As to the order of nature, which does not exist but which might have existed, St. Thomas (I-II:109:3) teaches that both for the knowledge of God and for the knowledge of moral duty, men such as we are would require some assistance from God to make their knowledge sufficiently extensive, clear, constant, effective, and relatively adequate; and especially to put it within reach of those who are much engrossed with the cares of material life. It would be absurd to suppose that in the order of nature God could be debarred from any revelation of Himself, and would leave Himself to be searched for quite irresponsively. Being a practical thing, conscience depends in large measure for its correctness upon the good use of it and on proper care taken to heed its deliverances, cultivate its powers, and frustrate its enemies. Even where due diligence is employed conscience will err sometimes, but its inculpable mistakes will be admitted by God to be not blameworthy. These are so many principles needed to steady us as we tread some of the ways of ethical history, where pitfalls are many.

IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIENCE CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY

(1) In pre-Christian times

The earliest written testimonies that we can consult tell us of recognized principles in morals, and if we confine our attention to the good which we find and neglect for the present the inconstancy and the admixture of many evils, we shall experience a satisfaction in the history. The Persians stood for virtue against vice in their support of Ahura Mazda against Ahriman; and it was an excellence of theirs to rise above “independent ethics” to the conception of God as the rewarder and the punisher. They even touched the doctrine of Christ’s saying, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” when to the question, what is the worth of the whole creation displayed before us, the Zend-Avesta has the reply: “the man therein who is delivered from evil in thought, word, and deed: he is the most valuable object on earth.” Here conscience was clearly enlightened. Of the moral virtues among the Persians truthfulness was conspicuous. Herodotus says that the youth were taught “to ride and shoot with the bow”, and “to speak the truth”. The unveracious Greeks, who admired the wiles of an Odysseus, were surprised at Persian veracity (Herodotus, I, 136, 138); and it may be that Herodotus is not fair on this head to Darius (III, 72). The Hindus in the Vedas do not rise high, but in Brahminism there is something more spiritual, and still more in the Buddhist reform on its best side, considered apart from the pessimistic view of life upon which its false asceticism was grounded. Buddhism had ten prohibitive commandments: three concerning the body, forbidding murder, theft, and unchastity; four concerning speech, forbidding lying, slander, abusive language, and vain conversation; and three concerning the mind internally, covetousness, malicious thoughts, and the doubting spirit. The Egyptians show the workings of conscience. In the “Book of the Dead” we find an examination of conscience, or rather profession of innocence, before the Supreme Judge after death. Two confessions are given enunciating most of the virtues (chap. cxxv): reverence for God; duties to the dead; charity to neighbours; duties of superiors and subjects; care for human life and limb; chastity, honesty, truthfulness, and avoidance of slander; freedom from covetousness. The Assyro-Babylonian monuments offer us many items on the favourable side; nor could the people whence issued the Code of Hammurabi, at a date anterior to the Mosaic legislation by perhaps seven hundred years, be ethically undeveloped. If the Code of Hammurabi has no precepts of reverence to God corresponding with the first three Commandments of the Mosaic Law, at least its preface contains a recognition of God’s supremacy. In China Confucius (c. 500 B. C.), in connection with an idea of heaven, delivered a high morality; and Mencius (c. 300 B. C.) developed this code of uprightness and benevolence as “Heaven’s appointment”. Greek ethics began to pass from its gnomic condition when Socrates fixed attention on the gnothi seauton in the interests of moral reflection. Soon followed Aristotle, who put the science on a lasting basis, with the great drawback of neglecting the theistic side and consequently the full doctrine of obligation. Neither for “obligation” nor for “conscience” had the Greeks a fixed term. Still the pleasures of a good conscience and the pains of an evil one were well set forth in the fragments collected by Stobaeus peri tou suneidotos. Penandros, asked what was true freedom, answered: “a good conscience” (Gaisford’s Stobaeus, vol. I, p. 429).

(2) In the Christian Fathers

The patristic treatment of ethics joined together Holy Scripture and the classical authors of paganism; no system was reached, but each Father did what was characteristic. Tertullian was a lawyer and spoke in legal terms: especially his Montanism urged him to inquire which were the mortal sins, and thus he started for future investigators a good line of inquiry. Clement of Alexandria was allegoric and mystic: a combiner of Orientalism, Hellenism, Judaism, and Christianity in their bearing on the several virtues and vices. The apologists, in defending the Christian character, dwelt on the marks of ethical conduct. St. Justin attributed this excellence to the Divine Logos, and thought that to Him, through Moses, the pagan philosophers were indebted (Apol., I, xliv). Similarly Origen accounted for pre-Christian examples of Christian virtue. As a Roman skilled in legal administration St. Ambrose was largely guided by Latin versions of Greek ethics, as is very well illustrated by his imitation in style of Cicero’s “De Officiis”, which he made the title of his own work. He discusses honestum et utile (I, ix); decorum, or to prepon as exhibited in Holy Scripture (x); various degrees of goodness, mediocre and perfect, in connection with the text, “if thou wilt be perfect” (xi); the passions of hot youth (xvii). Subsequent chapters dwell on the various virtues, as fortitude in war and its allied quality, courage in martyrdom (xl, xli). The second book opens with a discussion of beatitude, and then returns to the different virtues. It is the pupil of St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, who is, perhaps, the most important of the Fathers in the development of the Christian doctrine of conscience, not so much on account of his frequent discourses about moral subjects, as because of the Platonism which he drank in before his conversion, and afterwards got rid of only by degrees. The abiding result to the Scholastic system was that many writers traced their ethics and theology more or less to innate ideas, or innate dispositions, or Divine illuminations, after the example of St. Augustine. Even in St. Thomas, who was so distinctly an Aristotelean empiricist, some fancy that they detect occasional remnants of Augustinianism on its Platonic side.

Before leaving the Fathers we may mention St. Basil as one who illustrates a theorizing attitude. He was sound enough in recognizing sin to be graver and less grave; yet in the stress of argument against some persons who seemed to admit only the worst offenses against God to be real sins, he ventured without approving of Stoic doctrine, to point out a sort of equality in all sin, so far as all sin is a disobedience to God (Hom. de Justitia Dei, v-viii). Later Abelard and recently Dr. Schell abused this suggestion. But it has had no influence in any way like that of St. Augustine’s Platonism, of which a specimen may be seen in St. Bonaventure, when he is treating precisely of conscience, in a passage very useful as shedding light on a subsequent part of this article. Some habits, he says, are acquired, some innate as regards knowledge of singulars and knowledge of universals. “Quum enim ad cognitionem duo concurrant necessario, videlicet praesentia cognoscibilis et lumen quo mediante de illo judicamus, habitus cognoscitivi sunt quodammodo nobis innati ratione luminis animo inditi; sunt etiam acquisiti ratione speciei”–“For as two things necessarily concur for cognition, namely, the presence of something cognoscible, and the light by which we judge concerning it, cognoscitive habits are in a certain sense innate, by reason of the light wherewith the mind is endowed; and they are also acquired, by reason of the species.” (“Comment. in II Lib. Sent.”, dist. xxxix, art. 1, Q. ii. Cf. St. Thomas, “De Veritate”, Q. xi, art. 1: “Principia dicuntur innata quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur per species a sensibus abstractas”.–Principles are called innate when they are known at once by the light of the active intellect through the species abstracted from the senses.) Then comes the very noticeable and easily misunderstood addition a little later: “si quae sunt cognoscibilia per sui essentiam, non per speciem, respectu talium poterit dici conscientia esse habitus simpliciter innatus, utpote respectu upote respectu hujus quod est Deum amare et timere; Deus enim non cognoscitur per similitudinem a sensu, immo `Dei notitia naturaliter est nobis inserta’, sicut dicit Augustinus”–“if there are some things cognoscible through their very essence and not through the species, conscience, with regard to such things, may be called a habit simply innate, as, for example, with regard to loving and serving God; for God is not known by sense through an image; rather, ‘the knowledge of God is implanted in us by nature’, as Augustine says” (“In Joan.”, Tract. cvi, n. 4; “Confess.”, X, xx, xxix; “De Lib. Arbitr.”, I, xiv, xxxi; “De Mor. Eccl.”, iii, iv; “De Trin.”, XIII, iii, vi; “Joan. Dam. de Fide”, I, i, iii). We must remember that St. Bonaventure is not only a theologian but also a mystic, supposing in man oculus carnis, oculus rationis and oculus contemplationis (the eye of the flesh, the eye of reason, and the eye of contemplation); and that he so seriously regards man’s power to prove by arguments the existence of God as to devote his labour to explaining that logical conviction is consistent with faith in the same existence (Comm. in III Sent., dist. xxiv, art. 1, Q. iv). All these matters are highly significant for those who take up any thorough examination of the question as to what the Scholastics thought about man having a conscience by his very nature as a rational being. The point recurs frequently in Scholastic literature, to which we must next turn.

In Scholastic times

It will help to make intelligible the subtle and variable theories which follow, if it be premised that the Scholastics are apt to puzzle readers by mixing up with their philosophy of reason a real or apparent apriorism, which is called Augustinianism, Platonism, or Mysticism. As a rule, to which Durandus with some others was an exception, the Schoolmen regarded created causes as unable to issue in any definite act unless applied or stimulated by God, the Prime Mover: whence came the Thomistic doctrine of proemotio physica even for the intellect and the will, and the simple concursus of the non-Thomists. Furthermore they supposed some powers to be potential and passive, that is, to need a creative determinant received into them as their complement: of which kind a prominent example was the intellectus possibilis informed by the species intelligibilis, and another instance was in relation to conscience, the synteresis. (St. Thomas, De Verit., Q. xvi, art. 1, ad 13.) First principles or habits inherent in intellect and will were clearly traced by St. Thomas to an origin in experience and abstraction; but others spoke more ambiguously or even contradictorily; St. Thomas himself, in isolated passages, might seem to afford material for the priorist to utilize in favour of innate forms. But the Thomistic explanation of appetitus innatus, as contrasted with elicitus, saves the situation.

Abelard, in his “Ethics”, or “Nosce Teipsum”, does not plunge us into these depths, and yet he taught such an indwelling of the Holy Ghost in virtuous pagans as too unrestrictedly to make their virtues to be Christian. He placed morality so much in the inward act that he denied the morality of the outward, and sin he placed not in the objectively disordered deed but in contempt for God, in which opinion he was imitated by Prof. Schell. Moreover he opened a way to wrong opinions by calling free will “the free judgment about the will”. In his errors, however, he was not so wholly astray as careless reading might lead some to infer. It was with Alexander of Hales that discussions which some will regard as the tedious minutiae of Scholastic speculation began. The origin lay in the introduction from St. Jerome (in Ezech., I, Bk. I, ch. 1) of the term synteresis or synderesis. There the commentator, having treated three of the mystic animals in the Prophecy as symbolizing respectively three Platonic powers of the soul — to epithumetikon (the appetitive), to thumikon (the irascible), and to logikon (the rational) — uses the fourth animal, the eagle, to represent what he calls sunteresis. The last, according to the texts employed by him to describe it, is a supernatural knowledge: it is the Spirit Who groans in man (Romans 8:26), the Spirit who alone knows what is in man (1 Corinthians 2:11), the Spirit who with the body and the soul forms the Pauline trichotomy of I Thess., v, 23. Alexander of Hales neglects this limitation to the supernatural, and takes synteresis as neither a potentia alone, nor a habitus alone but a potentia habitualis, something native, essential, indestructible in the soul, yet liable to be obscured and baffled. It resides both in the intelligence and in the will: it is identified with conscience, not indeed on its lower side, as it is deliberative and makes concrete applications, but on its higher side as it is wholly general in principle, intuitive, a lumen innatum in the intellect and a native inclination to good in the will, voluntas naturalis non deliberativa (Summa Theologica I-II:71 to I-II:77). St. Bonaventure, the pupil, follows on the same lines in his “Commentarium in II Sent.” (dist. xxxix), with the difference that he locates the synteresis as calor et pondus in the will only distinguishing it from the conscience in the practical intellect, which he calls an innate habit–“rationale iudicatorium, habitus cognoscitivus moralium principiorum”– “a rational judgment, a habit cognoscitive of moral principles”. Unlike Alexander he retains the name conscience for descent to particulars: “conscientia non solum consistit in universali sed etiam descendit ad particularia deliberativa” –“conscience not only consists in the universal but also descends to deliberative particulars”. As regards general principles in the conscience, the habits are innate: while as regards particular applications, they are acquired (II Sent., dist xxxix, art. 1, Q; ii).

As forming a transition from the Franciscan to the Dominican School we may take one whom the Servite Order can at least claim as a great patron, though he seems not to have joined their body, Henry of Ghent. He places conscience in the intellect, not in the affective part–“non ad affectivam pertinet”–by which the Scholastics meant generally the will without special reference to feeling or emotion as distinguished in the modern sense from will. While Nicholas of Cusa described the Divine illumination as acting in blind-born man (virtus illuminati coecinati qui per fidem visum acquirit), Henry of Ghent required only assistances to human sight. Therefore he supposed: an influentia generalis Dei to apprehend concrete objects and to generalize thence ideas and principles; a light of faith; a lumen speciale wherewith was known the sincera et limpida veritas rerum by chosen men only, who saw things in their Divine exemplars but not God Himself; the lumen gloriæ to see God. For our purpose we specially note this: “conscientia ad partem animae cognitivam non pertinet, sed ad affectivam”–“conscience belongs not to the cognitive part of the mind, but to the affective” (Quodlibet., I, xviii). St. Thomas, leading the Dominicans, places synteresis not in the will but in the intellect, and he applies the term conscience to the concrete determinations of the general principle which the synteresis furnishes: “By conscience the knowledge given through synteresis is applied to particular actions”. (“De Verit.”, Q. xvii, a. 2.; Cf. Summa Theologica, Q. lxxix, a. 13; “III Sent.”, dist. xiv, a. 1, Q. ii; “Contra Gent.”, II, 59.) Albertus agrees with St. Thomas in assigning to the intellect the synteresis, which he unfortunately derives from syn and hoerere (haerens in aliquo) (Summa Theol., Pt. II, Q. xcix, memb. 2, 3; Summa de Creaturis, Pt. II, Q. lxix, a. 1). Yet he does not deny all place to the will: “Est rationis practicae . . . non sine voluntate naturali, sed nihil est voluntatis deliberativae (Summa Theol., Pt. II, Q. xcix, memb. 1). The preference of the Franciscan School for the prominence of will, and the preference of the Thomistic School for the prominence of intellect is characteristic. (See Scotus, IV Sent., dist. xlix, Q. iv.) Often this preference is less significant than it seems. Fouillée, the great defender of the idée force– idea as the active principle–allows in a controversy with Spencer that feeling and will may be involved in the idea. Having shown how Scholasticism began its research into conscience as a fixed terminology, we must leave the matter there, adding only three heads under which occasion was given for serious errors outside the Catholic tradition: While St. Augustine did excellent service in developing the doctrine of grace, he never so clearly defined the exact character of the supernatural as to approach the precision which was given through the condemnation of propositions taught by Baius and Jansenius; and in consequence his doctrine of original sin remained unsatisfactory. When Alexander of Hales, without distinction of natural and supernatural, introduced among the Scholastics the words of St. Jerome about synteresis as scintilla conscientia, and called it lumen innatum, he helped to perpetuate the Augustinian obscurity. As regards the intellect, several Scholastics inclined to the Arabian doctrine of intellectus agens, or to the Aristotelean doctrine of the Divine nous higher than the human soul and not perishable with it. Roger Bacon called the intellectus agens a distinct substance. Allied with this went Exemplarism, or the doctrine of archetypic ideas and the supposed knowledge of things in these Divine ideas. [Compare the prolepseis emphutoi of the Stoics, which were universals, koinai ennoiai]. Henry of Ghent distinguished in man a double knowledge: “primum exemplar rei est species eius universalis causata a re: secundum est ars divina, continens rerum ideales rationes” –“the first exemplar of a thing is universal species of it caused by the thing: the second is the Divine Art containing the ideal reasons (rationes) of things” (Theol., I, 2, n. 15). Of the former he says: “per tale exemplar acquisitum certa et infallibilis notitia veritatis est omnino impossibilis”–“through such an acquired exemplar, certain and infallible knowledge of truth is utterly impossible” (n. 17); and of the latter: “illi soli certam veritatem valent agnoscere qui earn in exemplari (aeterno) valent aspicere, quod non omnes valent”–“they alone can know certain truth who can behold it in the (eternal) exemplar, which not all can do” (I, 1, n. 21;). The perplexity was further increased when some, with Occam, asserted a confused intuition of things singular as opposed to the clearer idea got by the process of abstraction: “Cognitio singularis abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam ejusdem objecti”–“abstractive cognition of a singular presupposes intuitive cognition of the same object” (Quodlib., I, Q. xiii). Scotus also has taught the confused intuition of the singulars. Here was much occasion for perplexity on the intellectual side, about the knowledge of general principles in ethics and their application when the priority of the general to the particular was in question. The will also was a source of obscurity. Descartes supposed the free will of God to have determined what for conscience was to be right and what wrong, and he placed the act of volition in an affirmation of the judgment. Scotus did not go thus far, but some Scotists exaggerated the determining power of Divine will, especially so as to leave it to the choice of God indefinitely to enlarge a creature’s natural faculties in a way that made it hard to distinguish the natural from the supernatural. Connected with the philosophy of the will in matters of conscience is another statement open to controversy, namely, that the will can tend to any good object in particular only by reason of its universal tendency to the good. This is what Alexander of Hales means by synteresis as it exists in the will, when he says that it is not an inactive habit but a habit in some sense active of itself, or a general tendency, disposition, bias, weight, or virtuality. With this we might contrast Kant’s pure noumenal will, good apart from all determinedly good objects.

Anti-Scholastic Schools

The history of ethics outside the Scholastic domain, so far as it is antagonistic, has its extremes in Monism or Pantheism on the one side and in Materialism on the other.

Spinoza

Spinoza is a type of the Pantheistic opposition. His views are erroneous inasmuch as they regard all things in the light of a fated necessity, with no free will in either God or man; no preventable evil in the natural course of things; no purposed good of creation; no individual destiny or immortality for the responsible agent: indeed no strict responsibility and no strict retribution by reward or punishment. On the other hand many of Spinoza’s sayings if lifted into the theistic region, may be transformed into something noble. The theist, taking up Spinoza’s phraseology in a converted sense, may, under this new interpretation, view all passionate action, all sinful choice, as an “inadequate idea of things”, as “the preference of a part to the detriment of the whole”, while all virtue is seen as an “adequate idea” taking in man’s “full relation to himself as a whole, to human society and to God”. Again, Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis becomes finally, when duly corrected, the Beatific Vision, after having been the darker understanding of God enjoyed by Holy men before death, who love all objects in reference to God. Spinoza was not an antinomian in conduct; he recommended and practiced virtues. He was better than his philosophy on its bad side, and worse than his philosophy on its good side after it has been improved by Christian interpretation.

Hobbes

Hobbes stands for ethics on a Materialistic basis. Tracing all human action to self-love, he had to explain the generous virtues as the more respectable exhibitions of that quality when modified by social life. He set various schools of antagonistic thought devising hypotheses to account for disinterested action in man. The Cambridge Platonists unsatisfactorily attacked him on the principle of their eponymous philosopher, supposing the innate noemata to rule the empirical aisthemata by the aid of what Henry More called a “boniform faculty”, which tasted “the sweetness and savour of virtue”. This calling in of a special faculty had imitators outside the Platonic School; for example in Hutcheson, who had recourse to Divine “implantations” of benevolent disposition and moral sense, which remind us somewhat of synteresis as imperfectly described by Alexander of Hales. A robust reliance on reason to prove ethical truth as it proved mathematical truths, by inspection and analysis, characterized the opposition which Dr. Samuel Clarke presented to Hobbes. It was a fashion of the age to treat philosophy with mathematical rigour; but very different was the “geometrical ethics” of Spinoza, the necessarian, from that of Descartes, the libertarian, who thought that God’s free will chose even the ultimate reasons of right and wrong and might have chosen otherwise. If Hobbes has his representatives in the Utilitarians, the Cambridge Platonists have their representatives in more or less of the school of which T. H. Green is a leading light. A universal infinite mind seeks to realize itself finitely in each human mind or brain, which therefore must seek to free itself from the bondage of mere natural causality and rise to the liberty of the spirit, to a complete self-realization in the infinite Self and after its pattern. What this pattern ultimately is Green cannot say; but he holds that our way towards it at present is through the recognized virtues of European civilization, together with the cultivation of science and art. In the like spirit G.E. Moore finds the ascertainable objects that at present can be called “good in themselves” to be social intercourse and aesthetic delight.

Kant

Kant may stand midway between the Pantheistic and the purely Empirical ethics. On the one side he limited our knowledge, strictly so called, of things good to sense-experiences; but on the other he allowed a practical, regulative system of ideas lifting us up to God. Duty as referred to Divine commands was religion, not ethics: it was religion, not ethics, to regard moral precepts in the light of the commands of God. In ethics these were restricted to the autonomous aspect, that is, to the aspect of them under which the will of each man was its own legislator. Man, the noumenon, not the phenomenon, was his own lawgiver and his own end so far as morality went: anything beyond was outside ethics proper. Again, the objects prescribed as good or forbidden as bad did not enter in among the constituents of ethical quality: they were only extrinsic conditions. The whole of morality intrinsically was in the good will as pure from all content or object of a definite kind, from all definite inclination to benevolence and as deriving its whole dignity from respect for the moral law simply as a moral law, self-imposed, and at the same time universalized for all other autonomous individuals of the rational order. For each moral agent as noumenal willed that the maxim of his conduct should become a principle for all moral agents.

We have to be careful how in practice we impute consequences to men who hold false theories of conscience. In our historical sketch we have found Spinoza a necessarian or fatalist; but he believed in effort and exhortation as aids to good life. We have seen Kant assert the non-morality of Divine precept and of the objective fitness of things, but he found a place for both these elements in his system. Similarly Paulsen gives in the body of his work a mundane ethics quite unaffected by his metaphysical principles as stated in his preface to Book II. Luther logically might be inferred to be a thorough antinomian: he declared the human will to be enslaved, with a natural freedom only for civic duties; he taught a theory of justification which was in spite of evil deeds; he called nature radically corrupt and forcibly held captive by the lusts of the flesh; he regarded divine grace as a due and necessary complement to human nature, which as constituted by mere body and soul was a nature depraved; his justification was by faith, not only without works, but even in spite of evil works which were not imputed. Nevertheless he asserted that the good tree of the faith-justified man must bring forth good works; he condemned vice most bitterly, and exhorted men to virtue. Hence Protestants can depict a Luther simply the preacher of good, while Catholics may regard simply the preacher of evil. Luther has both sides.

V. CONSCIENCE IN ITS PRACTICAL WORKING

The supremacy of conscience

The supremacy of conscience is a great theme of discourse. “Were its might equal to its right”, says Butler, “it would rule the world”. With Kant we could say that conscience is autonomously supreme, if against Kant we added that thereby we meant only that every duty must be brought home to the individual by his own individual conscience, and is to this extent imposed by it; so that even he who follows authority contrary to his own private judgment should do so on his own private conviction that the former has the better claim. If the Church stands between God and conscience, then in another sense also the conscience is between God and the Church. Unless a man is conscientiously submissive to the Catholic Church his subjection is not really a matter of inner morality but is mechanical obedience.

Conscience as a matter of education and perfectibility

As in all other concerns of education, so in the training of conscience we must use the several means. As a check on individual caprice, especially in youth, we must consult the best living authorities and the best traditions of the past. At the same time that we are recipient our own active faculties must exert themselves in the pursuit with a keen outlook for the chances of error. Really unavoidable mistakes will not count against us; but many errors are remotely, when not proximately, preventable. From all our blunders we should learn a lesson. The diligent examiner and corrector of his own conscience has it in his power, by long diligence to reach a great delicacy and responsiveness to the call of duty and of higher virtue, whereas the negligent, and still more the perverse, may in some sense become dead to conscience. The hardening of the heart and the bad power to put light for darkness and darkness for light are results which may be achieved with only too much ease. Even the best criteria will leave residual perplexities for which provision has to be made in an ethical theory of probabilities which will be explained in the article PROBABILISM. Suffice it to say here that the theory leaves intact the old rule that a man in so acting must judge that he certainly is allowed thus to act, even though sometimes it might be more commendable to do otherwise. In inferring something to be permissible, the extremes of scrupulosity and of laxity have to be avoided.

The approvals and reprovals of conscience

The office of conscience is sometimes treated under too narrow a conception. Some writers, after the manner of Socrates when he spoke of his doemon as rather a restrainer than a promoter of action, assign to conscience the office of forbidding, as others assign to law and government the negative duty of checking invasion upon individual liberty. Shaftesbury (Inquiry II, 2, 1) regards conscience as the consciousness of wrongdoing, not of rightdoing. Carlyle in his “Essay on Characteristics” asserts that we should have no sense of having a conscience but for the fact that we have sinned; with which view we may compare Green’s idea about a reasoned system of ethics (Proleg., Bk. IV, ch. ii, sect. 311) that its use is negative “to provide a safeguard against the pretext which in a speculative age some inadequate and misapplied theories may afford our selfishness rather than in the way of pointing out duties previously ignored”. Others say that an ethics of conscience should no more be hortatory than art should be didactic. Mackenzie (Ethics, 3rd ed., Bk. III, ch. I, sect. 14) prefers to say simply that “conscience is a feeling of pain accompanying and resulting from nonconformity to principle”. The suggestion which, by way of contrary, these remarks offer is that we should use conscience largely as an approving and an instigating and an inspiring agency to advance us in the right way. We should not in morals copy the physicists, who deny all attractive force and limit force to vis a tergo, a push from behind. Nor must we think that the positive side of conscience is exhausted in urging obligations: it may go on in spite of Kant, beyond duty to works of supererogation. Of course there is a theory which denies the existence of such works on the principle that every one is simply bound to the better and the best if he feels himself equal to the heroic achievement. This philosophy would lay it down that he who can renounce all and give it to the poor is simply obliged to do so, though a less generous nature is not bound, and may take advantage –if it be an advantage–of its own inferiority. Not such was the way in which Christ put the case: He said hypothetically, “if thou wilt be perfect”, and His follower St. Peter said to Ananias “Was not [thy land] thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? . . . Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.” (Acts 5:4) We have, then, a sphere of duty and beyond that a sphere of free virtue, and we include both under the domain of conscience. It is objected that only a prig considers the approving side of his conscience, but that is true only of the priggish manner, not of the thing itself; for a sound mind may very well seek the joy which comes from a faithful, generous heart, and make it an effort of conscience that outstrips duty to aim at higher perfection, not under the false persuasion that only after duty has been fulfilled does merit begin, but under the true conviction that duty is meritorious, and that so also is goodness in excess of duty. Not that the eye is to be too narrowly fixed on rewards: these are included, while virtue for virtue’s sake and for the sake of God is carefully cultivated.

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JOHN RICKABY Transcribed by Rick McCarty

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IVCopyright © 1908 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat. Remy Lafort, CensorImprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia

Conscience

SEE ETHICS; SEE MORAL PHILOSOPHY,

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Conscience (2)

signifies knowledge in conjunction; that is, in conjunction with the fact to which it is a witness, as the eye is to the. action done before it; or, as South observes, it is a double or joint knowledge, namely, one of a divine law or rule, and the other of a man’s own action. It may be defined to be the judgment which a man passes on the morality of his actions, as to their purity or turpitude; or the secret testimony of the soul, whereby it approves things that are good, and condemns those that are evil. Some object to its being called an act, habit, or faculty. An act, say they, would be represented as an agent, whereas conscience is a testimony. To say it is a habit, is to speak of it as a disposition acting, which is scarcely more accurate than ascribing one act to another; and, besides, it would be strange language to say that conscience itself is a habit. Against defining it by the name of a power or faculty it is objected, that it occasions a false notion of it, as a distinct power from reason.

I. The moral ground of conscience. We must distinguish between a rule that of itself and immediately binds the conscience, and a rule that is occasionally of use to direct and satisfy the conscience.

1. The will of God is the only rule immediately binding the conscience. No one has authority over the conscience but God. All penal laws, therefore, in matters of mere conscience, or things that do not evidently effect the civil state, are certainly unlawful.

2. The commands of superiors, not only natural parents, but civil, as magistrates or masters, and every man’s private engagements, are rules of conscience in things indifferent.

3. The examples of wise and good men may become rules of conscience; but here it must be observed, that, no example or judgment is of any authority against. law: where the law is doubtful, and even where there is no doubt, the side of example cannot be taken till inquiry has been first made concerning what the law directs.

II. Conscience has been divided into the following kinds:

2. A right conscience is that which decides aright, or according to the only rule of rectitude, the law of God. This is also called a well-informed conscience, which in all its decisions proceeds upon the most evident principles of truth.

3. A probable conscience is that which, in cases that admit of the brightest and fullest light, contents itself with bare probabilities. The consciences of many are of no higher character; and though we must not say a man cannot be saved with such a conscience, yet such a conscience is not so perfect as it might be.

4. An ignorant conscience is that which may declare right, but, as it were, by chance, and without any just ground to build on.

5. An erroneous conscience is a conscience mistaken in its decisions about the nature of actions.

6. A doubting conscience is a conscience unresolved about the nature of actions, on account of the equal or nearly equal probabilities which appear for and against each side of the question.

7. Of an evil conscience there are several kinds. Conscience, in regard to actions in general, is evil when it has lost more or less the sense it ought to have of the natural distinctions of moral good and evil: this is a polluted or defiled conscience. Conscience is evil in itself when it gives either none or a false testimony as to past actions; when, reflecting upon wickedness, it feels no pain, it is evil, and said to be seared or hardened (1Ti 4:2). It is also evil when, during the commission of sin, it lies quiet. In regard to future actions, conscience is evil if it does not start at the proposal of sin, or connives at the commission of it.

III. For the right management of conscience, we should,

1. Endeavor to obtain acquaintance with the law of God, and with our own tempers and lives, and frequently compare them together.

2. Furnish conscience with general principles of the most extensive nature and strongest influence; such as the supreme love of God; love to our neighbors as ourselves; and that the care of our souls is of the greatest importance.

3. Preserve the purity and sensibility of conscience.

4. Maintain the freedom of conscience, particularly against interest, passion, temper, example. and the authority of great names.

5. We should accustom ourselves tocool reflection on our past actionls. SEE MORAL SENSE.

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Conscience

that faculty of the mind, or inborn sense of right and wrong, by which we judge of the moral character of human conduct. It is common to all men. Like all our other faculties, it has been perverted by the Fall (John 16:2; Acts 26:9; Rom. 2:15). It is spoken of as “defiled” (Titus 1:15), and “seared” (1 Tim. 4:2). A “conscience void of offence” is to be sought and cultivated (Acts 24:16; Rom. 9:1; 2 Cor. 1:12; 1 Tim. 1:5, 19; 1 Pet. 3:21).

Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Conscience

We look in vain for the word conscience in the O.T., except in the margin of Ecc 10:20, where it represents part of the word Yada’, to know (Assyrian, id) in the Apocryphal Books we meet with twice, viz in Sir 10:20, where it is rendered ‘wittingly;’ and in Sap. 17:11, where it seems to point to the constraining power of a sense of right. The verb is used of knowledge in Lev 5:1; also in Job 27:6, where the LXX reads , ‘I am not conscious of having acted foolishly,’ words which have no Hebrew text answering to them, but which find an echo in St. Paul’s phrase, ‘I know nothing against myself’ ( ), 1Co 4:4.

The verb is also used to represent ordinary perception, without reference to the moral aspect of the thing perceived, in five passages in the Books of the Maccabees.

Conscience, then, so far as the O.T. throws any light on it, is to be taken not as a separate faculty which enables a man to distinguish right and wrong, but as the exercise of consciousness; and it will be seen, by noting the passages in the N.T in which the word occurs, that this meaning is generally adhered to. Omitting Joh 8:9, the reading of which is doubtful, we do not meet with the word until we arrive at the end of the Acts. St. Paul, standing before the council, says, ‘ in all good conscience have I lived under the government of God unto this day’ (Act 23:1). These words are elucidated by the statement made before Felix, ‘ in this I exercise myself, having (or to have) a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man’ (Act 24:16). He evidently signified that he was not conscious of living or aiming to live in any course which was wrong in the sight of God or really offensive to man in exact accordance with these expressions, he writes to the Corinthians, ‘I am not conscious of anything against myself, yet am I not here by justified, but he that judgeth me is the Lord’ (1Co 4:4).

The same Apostle refers to his consciousness that what he said was spoken in sincerity, in Rom 9:1, ‘My conscience also bearing witness.’ Compare Rom 2:15; 2Co 4:2; 2Co 5:11 in 1Co 8:7, we read of those who are eating ‘with conscience of the idol’–that is, with a conscious feeling that they are eating what is offered to idols; and their conscience, i.e. their moral sense, being weak and susceptible, is defiled. See also the tenth verse.

The moral sensibility or conscience is referred to in 1Co 10:25; 1Co 10:27-29, ‘Asking no questions because of consciousness; not your own consciousness, but that of the weak brother who has not yet attained to that liberty and knowledge which enables you to disregard heathen superstitions.’

When St. Paul is describing the end or sum and substance of the charge which Christ lays up on men, he characterises it as ‘love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith’ (1Ti 1:5); by these words he means that there should be nothing selfish or sensual in love, that there should be a conscious aim at that which is good in God’s sight, and a faithfulness untainted by a particle of hypocrisy. Compare 1Ti 1:19, where faith and a good conscience are again joined together.

The passages in the Epistle to the Hebrews in which the word occurs are very interesting and important. From Heb 9:9, we gather that the offerings under the O.T. could not make men ‘perfect as pertaining to the conscience,’ i.e. could not take away the sense of sin which hinders man from oneness with God. They did not take away sin, as a matter of fact, and they could not, from the nature of things; for if the effect of the Levitical dispensation had been to make men perfect, i.e. at one with God (see chap. viii. 2), the offerings would not have needed repetition. If the worshippers had been purged once for all, they would have had no more consciousness of sins (Heb 10:2). But ‘the blood of Christ’ cleanses a man’s consciousness from dead works, and enables him to serve the living God (Heb 9:14); and the heart is thus ‘sprinkled from an evil conscience’ (10:22) in other words, the faithful acceptance of the sacrifice of Christ takes away that sense of sin which had been a bar between man and God, and enables a man to live no longer as a servant, but as a son.

St. Peter says, ‘This is grace (A. V. thankworthy) if from conscience towards God (i.e. through consciousness of his duty and of his relationship to God in Christ) a man endure pains, suffering unjustly’ (1Pe 2:19). He urges that men should keep ‘a good conscience’ (3:16), and he reminds them that it is not the external cleansing, the putting away of the filth of the flesh, that now saves us, hut the answer of a good conscience toward God, or, as we might render it, the seeking [ . this passage has awakened much discussion. I am inclined to be guided by the fact that sometimes answers to the meaning of darash (), to seek, in the O. T. The Vulgate confirms this view by reading interrogatio conscientiae bonae in Deum. Luther renders ‘the contract (Bund) of a good conscience (Gewissen) with God.’ De Sacy takes it as ‘the engagement of the conscience to keep pure for God.’] unto God with a good conscience (1Pe 3:21).

The verb , to be conscious, is used in only three passages in the N.T., exclusive of that already mentioned in 1Co 4:4, viz in Act 5:2; Act 12:12; Act 14:6.

Conscience was thus originally identical with consciousness, but while the latter word may be used by us with reference to external facts or to internal feelings, the former is now confined to the knowledge that a man has of the moral aspect of things. A good conscience, according to Scripture, is not only a sense of freedom from past guilt, but also a consciousness of purposing and doing that which is good in God’s sight; it implies purity of motive and action; it is inconsistent with a deliberate course of sin, or with departure from the living God, and it is closely connected with faith in Christ.

Words Marking Intelligence

Coming to the words which designate man’s intellectual capacities, we may beg in with the word wisdom. this word generally answers in the A. V. to the Hebrew Chacam (). this is an important word in Scripture, and is used to represent the discernment of good and evil, prudence in secular matters, skill in arts, experience in Divine things, and even dexterity in magic in the reflexive form it signifies to be wise in one’s own eyes, and hence to outwit another. The general rendering of the LXX is , which is used in the same largeness of sense in the N.T. See especially Jam 3:17. It is moral rather than intellectual; it is the adaptation of what we know to what we have to do in this sense the Lord Jesus grew in wisdom, i.e in its exercise.

The understanding is most generally represented by the word b in (), to perceive, to be intelligent. this word, again, is used with many shades of meaning, suc has to consider, discern, feel, know, look, mark, perceive, view. The LXX usually represents this word by , but occasionally by and .

Sacal (), to look, to be knowing, and hence to prosper, is used to represent a certain kind of wisdom in Gen 3:6, and a good many other passages. The LXX renderings are generally the same as those last mentioned.

One word remains to be noticed, namely, tushiah (). The LXX renderings for this word are very variable. Some critics understand it as signifying essentia, or existent being. Hence it is rendered ‘that which is’ in Job 11:13; Job 26:3, and substance in Job 30:22. Compare the cognate yesh () in Pro 8:21 in Isa 28:29, it is translated working, ‘wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.’ in Job 5:12, we find the word enterprise adopted. The most general rendering, however, is wisdom, or sound wisdom. Thus we read in Job 6:13, ‘ is wisdom quite driven from me?’ Pro 2:7, ‘He layeth up sound wisdom for the righteous;’ 8:14, ‘Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom;’ Mic 6:9, ‘The Lord’s voice crieth unto the city, and (the man of) wisdom shall see thy name;’ the margin has here, ‘Thy name shall see that which is.’

Fuente: Synonyms of the Old Testament

CONSCIENCE

There is within the human mind something that acts as a moral judge. It tells people what is right and wrong, urges them to do right, and gives them feelings of either innocence or guilt, depending on whether they obey or disobey it. This moral judge we call conscience (Rom 2:15-16; 1Jn 3:19-21).

Although the Old Testament does not mention the word conscience, it certainly refers to the activity of conscience (Gen 3:7-8; 2Sa 24:10; Job 27:6; Psa 32:3; Psa 51:3-4). Conscience is not a perfect judge, because sin has affected the conscience as it has affected every other part of human nature (Luk 11:35; Eph 2:1-3). Therefore the conscience, like the rest of human nature, needs cleansing from the effects of sin, and this comes about only through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ (Heb 9:14; Heb 10:22).

The conscience also needs instruction, because it can only make judgments according to the knowledge it possesses (Rom 2:14-15; 1Co 8:7; 1Co 8:10). Christians must therefore train and discipline the conscience so that it is well instructed, pure, active and sensitive (Act 24:16; Eph 4:17; Eph 4:23; 1Ti 1:5; 1Ti 1:19; 2Ti 1:3). When people ignore conscience, it can easily become defiled, hardened or dead (1Ti 4:2; Tit 1:15).

A properly developed conscience will lead people to do what is right, whether a written law demands it or not (Rom 13:5; 1Pe 3:16). Christians must be careful to keep the conscience clear in all that they do (2Co 1:12; Heb 13:18). At the same time they must realize that a clear conscience does not necessarily mean they are faultless (1Co 4:4-5). Sometimes the conscience may be clear in relation to something they want to do, but they decide not to do it because of the bad effect it could have on others (Rom 14:22-23; 1Co 10:28-29). The conscience must be clear before God, not just clear according to standards people set for themselves (Act 23:1; Rom 9:1).

Fuente: Bridgeway Bible Dictionary

Conscience

CONSCIENCE.The term occurs 30 times in the NT; it signifies joint knowledge. The two things known together may be two motives, two deeds, etc.; or the comparison instituted may be between a standard and a volition, etc. Self or others may be judged, and approval (Act 23:1; Act 24:16, Rom 9:1, 2Co 1:12, 1Ti 1:5; 1Ti 1:19; 1Ti 3:9, 2Ti 1:3, Heb 13:18, 1Pe 3:16; 1Pe 3:21) or disapproval (Joh 8:9, Heb 9:9; Heb 10:2; Heb 10:22) may be the issue. The conviction that a certain course of conduct is right is accompanied by a sense of obligation, whether that course receives (Rom 13:5) or fails to secure (1Pe 2:19, Act 4:19-20) legal confirmation. The belief on which the consciousness of duty depends is not necessarily wise (1Co 8:7; 1Co 8:10; 1Co 8:12, Act 26:9), though the holders of the belief should receive careful consideration on the part of more enlightened men (Rom 15:1, 1Co 8:1-13; 1Co 10:25; 1Co 10:29). Unfaithfulness to moral claims leads to fearful deterioration, resulting in confusion (Mat 6:22-23) and insensitiveness (1Ti 4:2, Tit 1:15).

1. Sphere.The sphere of conscience is volition in all its manifestations. That which merely happens and offers to us no alternative movement lies outside morality. Let there be a possibility of choice, and conscience appears. Appetites, so far as they can be controlled; incentives of action admitting preference; purposes and desires,all deeds and Institutions that embody and give effect to human choice; all relationships that allow variations in our attitude give scope for ethical investigation, and in them conscience is directly or indirectly implicated. Conscience makes a valuation. It is concerned with right, wrong; worthiness, unworthiness; good, bad; better, worse. This appraisement is ultimately occupied with the incentives that present themselves to the will, in regard to some of which (envy and malice, for instance) there is an Immediate verdict of badness, and in regard to others a verdict of better or worse. The dispositions that are commended by the Saviours conduct and teachingspurity of heart, meekness, mercifulness, desire for righteousness, etc.are recognized as worthy of honour. The conscience censures the selfishness of the Unjust Judge (Luk 18:6), and assents to the injunction of considerateness and justice (Php 2:4). The rightness of many general statements is discerned intnitively, and is carried over to the deeds that agree therewith. Sidgwick considers that the statement I ought not to prefer my own lesser good to the greater good of another is axiomatic, and that some such intnitively discerned principle is a necessary foundation of morals. We do not question the baseness of some pleasures; their curse is graven on their foreheads. Both mediately and immediately we arrive at ethical convictions. The appearance in ones life of a person of distinguished excellence will cause many virtues to shine in our estimation. The mind surveying a course of conduct can judge it as bad or good on the whole. A precept to seek to raise the whole tone of ones life (Mat 5:48, Col 4:12) is felt to be reasonable, and as the capacity for improvement is greater in man than in any other creature, better motives, deeds, habits, aims, characters may righteously be demanded.

2. Obligation.In the recognition of any conduct as right there is involved an authoritative prescription to do it. This feeling of oughtnesswhich is the core of consciencecan be exhibited but not analyzed. It is an ultimate. It is unique. It is an evidence within the soul that we are under government. There is a categorical imperative to aim at that which we have admitted to be right. From the duty discerned there issues a command which cannot be silenced so long as the duty is present to the mind. Likings or dislikings, hopes or fears, popularity or unpopularityno matter what may be advanced,the dictatorial mandate is unaltered:

Tis mans perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die.

When Jesus Christ asserts His supremacy and demands deference to Himself at all costs, He does so as the incarnation of the moral law. To be His friend is to be under His orders (Joh 15:14), and one is bound to follow Him without regard to any claims that can be urged by self or kindred (Mat 10:37-38, Luk 14:33). Let it be ascertained that this is the way and the command is at once heard, Walk ye in it. The peremptory claim made by conscience is eminently reasonable, because it rests upon what we have admitted to be right. It is a provision in our nature that linksor that would link if we were loyalbelief and practice, and would cause us to be builders as well as architects. Had it strength as it has right; had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world (Butler, Serm. ii.).

3. The ethical feeling.The perception of oughtness has its own emotional tone. There is, of course, a sense of relief when the mind has arrived at a decision; but is there not an additional element? Is there not an inclinationat least a faint onein favour of the behest? And in men habitually conscientious, is not the inclination immediate and strong? All men are clearly aware that they are wrong in case of refusal to obey. Man is a born judge of himself, and the verdict that results from self-examination brings peace or uneasiness. Herod is ill at ease by reason of self-judgment (Mar 6:20), and so is Felix (Act 24:25). Peter sees himself as one who has broken the law, and the light hurts him (Luk 5:8). All the best men have had some experience like that of Isaiah (Isa 6:5) and that of Job (Job 42:6), for with them the moral susceptibility has been great. All the emotional accompaniments of penitence and remorse, as well as the glow incident to the hearing of noble deedsall anticipations of the Lords Well done! are instances of moral feeling. These pleasures and pains are a class by themselves. They are as distinct from those of sensation and intellect as colours are distinct from sound. That pleasures are qualitatively different was rightly maintained by J. S. Mill, though his general theory was not helped by the opinion. In consciousness we know that sorrow for sin is not of the same order as any physical distress, nor is it to be ranked with the feeling of disappointment when we are baffled in a scientific inquiry. The difference between the moral and the unmoral emotions is one of kind and not of quantity, of worth and not of amount: some pleasures low in the scale of value are very intense, while the moral satisfactions may have small intensity and yet are preferred by good men to any physical or intellectual delights. It should be noticed that the pleasure attendant upon a choice of conduct known to be right may be not unmixed; for the feelings, clinging for a while to that which has been discarded, interfere with the satisfaction due to the change that has been made. Converts are haunted by renounced beliefs, and their peace is disturbed; beside the main current of emotion there is a stream which comes from past associations and habits.

4. Education of conscience.(1) No training can impart the idea of right: it is constitutional. (2) Malevolent feelings (as vindictiveness, the desire to give pain gratuitously) are known by all to be wrong; immediately they are perceived at work, they are unconditionally condemned. (3) The inward look makes no mistake as to our meaning, gets no wavering reply to such questions as, Do you desire to have full light? to know all the facts? to be impartial? to act as a good man should act in this particular? For this accurate self-knowledge provision is made in our nature. (4) Some general moral principles are accepted as soon as the terms are understood. (5) When two competing incentives are to be judged, we know, and cannot be taught, which is the higher. (6) The imperative lodged in a moral conviction is intuitively discerned. I do not know how to impart the notion of moral obligation to any one who is entirely devoid of it (Sidgwick). (7) The feeling of dishonour comes to us without tuition when we have refused compliance with known duty. Belonging to a moral order, we are made to react in certain definite ways to truths, social relations, etc. The touch of experience is enough to quicken into action certain moral states, just as the feelings of cold and heat are ours because of the physical environment, and because we are what we are. We can evoke while we cannot create the elementary moral qualities. An erring conscience is a chimera (Kant). Conscience intuitively recognizes moral law; it is supreme in its authority; it cannot be educated (Calderwood). These sentences are not intended to deny that in the application of principles there is difficulty. One may readily admit the axioms of geometry, and yet find much perplexity when asked to establish a geometrical theorem the truth of which directly or indirectly flows from the axioms. The Apostle Paul prayed that his friends might improve in moral discrimination (Php 1:10, Col 1:9). We have to learn what to do, and often the problems set by our domestic, civic, and church relationships are hard even for the best and wisest to solve. The scheme of things to which we belong has not been constructed with a view to saving us the trouble of patient, strenuous, and sometimes very painful investigation and thought.

5. Implications.Of the many implications the following are specially noteworthy. The feeling of responsibility suggests the question, to Whom? Being under government, we feel after the Ruler if haply we may find Him. Jesus tells us of the Righteous Father. The solemn voice of command is His. The preferences which we know to be right are His. The pain felt when righteous demands are resisted, and the joy accompanying obedience, are they not His frown and smile? Neither our higher self nor society can be the source of an authority so august as that of which we are conscious. To the best minds we look for guidance; but there are limits to their rights over us, and how ready they are to refer us to Him before whom they bow! We are made to be subjects of the Holy One. Admitting that we are in contact with Divine Authority, and that His behests are heard within, the encouraging persuasion is justified that He sympathizes with the soul in its battles and renders aid (Php 2:12-13). The inference that it is God with whom we have to do makes it fitting for us to say that conscience is mans capacity to receive progressively a revelation of the righteousness of God. But is law the last word? May there not be mercy and an atonement? Cannot the accusing voices be hushed? May the man who admits the sentence of conscience be pardoned? Conscience is a John the Baptist preparing the way for the Saviour, who has a reply to the question What must I do to be saved?

W. J. Henderson.

Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible

Conscience

konshens ( , he sunedesis):

I.Sequent Conscience

1.Judicial

2.Punitive

3.Predictive

4.Social

II.Antecedent Conscience

III.Intuitional and Associational Theories

IV.The Education of Conscience

V.History and Literature

1.Earlier Views

2.Reformation and After

I. Sequent Conscience

The aspect of conscience earliest noticed in literature and most frequently referred to at all times is what is called the Sequent Conscience – that is to say, it follows action.

1. Judicial

This is judicial. No sooner is a decision formed than there ensues a judgment favorable or adverse, a sentence of guilty or not guilty. Conscience has often been compared to a court of law, in which there are culprit, judge, witnesses and jury; but these are all in the subject’s own breast, and are in fact himself.

2. Punitive

It is punitive. In the individual’s own breast are not only the figures of justice already mentioned, but the executioner as well; for, on the back of a sentence of condemnation or acquittal, there immediately follows the pain of a wounded or the satisfaction of an approving conscience; and of all human miseries or blisses this is the most poignant. Especially has the remorse of an evil conscience impressed the human imagination, in such instances as Cain and Judas, Saul and Herod; and the poets, those knowers of human nature, have found their most moving themes in the delineation of this aspect of human experience. The ancient poets represented the terrors of conscience under the guise of the Erinyes or Furies, who, with swift, silent, unswerving footstep, tracked the criminal and pulled him down, while Shakespeare, in such dramas as Macbeth and Richard the Third, has burned the same lessons into the imagination of all readers of his works. The satisfaction of a good conscience may stamp itself on the habitual serenity of one face, and the accusations of an evil conscience may impart a hunted and sinister expression to another (compare The Wisdom of Solomon 17:11).

3. Predictive

It is predictive. There is no instinct in the soul of man more august than the anticipation of something after death – of a tribunal at which the whole of life will be revised and retribution awarded with perfect justice according to the deeds done in the body. It is this which imparts to death its solemnity; we instinctively know that we are going to our account. And such great natural instincts cannot be false.

4. Social

It is social. Not only does a man’s own conscience pass sentence on his conduct, but the consciences of others pass sentence on it too; and to this may be due a great intensification of the consequent sensations. Thus, a crime may lie hidden in the memory, and the pain of its guilt may be assuaged by the action of time, when suddenly and unexpectedly it is found out and exposed to the knowledge of all; and, only when the force of the public conscience breaks forth on the culprit, driving him from society, does he feel his guilt in all its magnitude. The Day of Judgment (which see), as it is represented in Scripture, is an application of this principle on a vast scale; for there the character and conduct of everyone will be submitted to the conscience of all. On the other hand, a friend may be to a man a second conscience, by which his own conscience is kept alive and alert; and this approval from without may, in some cases, be, even more than the judgment within, an encouragement to everything that is good or a protection against temptation.

II. Antecedent Conscience

From the Sequent is distinguished the Antecedent Conscience, which designates a function of this faculty preceding moral decision or action. When the will stands at the parting of the ways, seeing clearly before it the right course and the wrong, conscience commands to strike into the one and forbids to choose the other. This is its imperative; and – to employ the language of Kant – it is a categorical imperative. What conscience commands may be apparently against our interests, and it may be completely contrary to our inclinations; it may be opposed to the advice of friends or to the solicitations of companions; it may contradict the decrees of principalities and powers or the voices of the multitude; yet conscience in no way withdraws or modifies its claim. We may fail to obey, giving way to passion or being overborne by the allurements of temptation; but we know that we ought to obey; it is our duty; and this is a sublime and sacred word. The great crises of life arise when conscience is issuing one command and self-interest or passion or authority another, and the question has to be decided which of the two is to be obeyed. The interpreters of human life have known how to make use of such moments, and many of the most memorable scenes in literature are of this nature; but the actual history of mankind has also been dignified with numerous instances in which confessors and martyrs, standing on the same ground, have faced death rather than contravene the dictates of the authority within; and there never passes an hour in which the eye of the All-seeing does not behold someone on earth putting aside the bribes or self-interest or the menaces of authority and paying tribute to conscience by doing the right and taking the consequences.

III. Intuitional and Associational Theories

Up to this point there is little difficulty or difference of opinion; but now we come to a point at which very differing views emerge. It was remarked above, that when anyone stands at the parting of the ways, seeing clearly the right course and the wrong, conscience imperatively commands him which to choose and which to avoid; but how does anyone know which of the two alternatives is the right and which the wrong? Does conscience still suffice here, or is he dependent on another faculty? Here the Intuitional and the Associational, or – speaking broadly – the Scotch and the English, the German and the French schools of ethics diverge, those on the one side holding that conscience has still essential guidance to give, while those on the other maintain that the guidance must now be undertaken by other faculties. The Sensational or Experimental school holds that we are dependent on the authority of society or on our own estimate of the consequences of actions, while the opposite school teaches that in the conscience there is a clear revelation of certain moral laws, approving certain principles of action and disapproving others. The strong point of the former view is the diversity which has existed among human beings in different ages and in different latitudes as to what is right and what is wrong. What was virtuous in Athens might be sinful in Jerusalem; what is admired as heroism in Japan may be despised as fool-hardiness in Britain. To this it may be replied, first, that the diversity has been greatly exaggerated; the unanimity of the human conscience under all skies being greater than is allowed by philosophers of this school. Let any plain, honest man, says Butler, before he engages in any course of action, ask himself, Is this I am going about right, or is it wrong? Is it good, or is it evil? and I do not in the least doubt but that this question will be answered agreeably to truth and virtue by almost any fair man in almost any circumstances. Then, there are many moral judgments supposed to be immediate verdicts of conscience which are really logical inferences from the utterances of this faculty and are liable to all the fallacies by which reasoning in any department of human affairs is beset. It is only for the major premise, not for the conclusion, that conscience is responsible. The strong point of the Intuitional school, on the other hand, is the power and right of the individual to break away from the habits of society, and, in defiance of the commands of authority or the voices of the multitude, to follow a course of his own. When he does so, is it a logical conclusion as to the consequences of action he is obeying, or a higher intuition? When, for example, Christianity announced the sinfulness of fornication in opposition to the laxity of Greece and Rome, was it an argument about consequences with which she operated successfully, or an instinct of purity which she divined at the back of the actions and opinions of heathendom? The lettering of the moral law may have to be picked out and cleansed from the accumulations of time, but the inscription is there all the same.

IV. The Education of Conscience

It may be, however, that a more exact analysis of the antecedent conscience is requisite. Between the categorical imperative, which commands to choose the right path and avoid the wrong, and the indicative, which declares that this is the right way and that the wrong, there ought perhaps to be assumed a certainty that one of the alternative ways is right and must be pursued at all hazards, while the other is wrong and must be abandoned at whatever cost. This perception, that moral distinctions exist, separate from each other as heaven and hell, is the peculiarity of conscience; but it does not exclude the necessity for taking time to ascertain, in every instance, which of the alternatives has the one character and which the other, or for employing a great variety of knowledge to make this sure. Those who would limit conscience to the faculty which utters the major premises of moral reasoning are wont to hold that it can never err and does not admit of being educated; but such a use of the term is too remote from common usage, and there must be room left for the conscience to enlighten itself by making acquaintance with such objective standards as the character of God, the example of Christ, and the teaching of Scripture, as well as with the maxims of the wise and the experience of the good.

Another question of great interest about the conscience is, whether it involves an intuition of God. When it is suffering the pain of remorse, who is it that inflicts the punishment? Is it only the conscience itself? Or is man, in such experiences aware of the existence of a Being outside of and above himself? When the will is about to act, it receives the command to choose the right and refuse the wrong; but who issues this command? Is it only itself, or does the imperative come with a sanction and solemnity betokening a higher origin? Conscience is an intuition of moral law – the reading, so to speak, of a luminous writing, which hangs out there, on the bosom of Nature – but who penned that writing? It used to be thought that the word Conscience implied, in its very structure, a reference to God, meaning literally, knowledge along with another, the other being God. Though this derivation be uncertain, many think that it exactly expresses the truth. There are few people with an ethical experience of any depth who have not sometimes been overwhelmingly conscious of the approval or disapproval of an unseen Being; and, if there be any trustworthy argument for the existence of a Deity, prior to supernatural revelation, this is where it is to be found.

V. History and Literature

Only a few indications of history can be given here.

1. Earlier Views

The conscience, at least the sequent conscience, was identified in the ancient world, and the rise of a doctrine on the subject belongs to the period when the human mind, being shut out from public activity through political changes, was thrown back upon itself and began to watch closely its own symptoms. The word has a specially prominent place in the philosophical writings of Cicero. Strange to say, it does not occur in the Old Testament; but, though not the name, the thing appears there frequently enough. On the very first page of revelation, the voice of God is heard calling among the trees of the garden (Gen 3:8); and, in the very next incident, the blood of Abel cries out to heaven from the ground (Gen 4:10). In the New Testament the word occurs with tolerable frequency, especially in the speeches (Act 24:16, etc.) and writings of Paul (Rom 2:15; Rom 9:1; Rom 13:5; 1Co 6:7-12, etc.); and this might have been expected to secure for it a prominent place in the doctrine of the church. But this did not immediately take effect, although Chrysostom already speaks of Conscience and Nature as two books in which the human mind can read of God, previous to supernatural revelation. In the Middle Ages the conscience received from two sources so much stimulation that both thing and name were certain to come into greater prominence in the speculations of the schools. The one of these influences was the rise of Monasticism, which, driving human beings into solitude, made the movements of their own minds the objects of everlasting study to themselves; and the other was the practice of auricular confession, which became, especially to many of the inmates of the houses of religion, the most interesting business of life; because, in order to meet the confessor, they scanned every thought and weighed every scruple, becoming adepts at introspection and self-discipline. Thus it came to pass that ethics took the form of Cases of Conscience, the priest having to train himself, or to be trained by professors and through books, to be able to answer every query submitted to him in the confessional. The ripest fruit of this method appears in the Summa of Aquinas, who discusses elaborately the doctrine of conscience, dividing it into two parts – synderesis (from , sunteresis) and conscientia – the one of which supplies the major premises and cannot err, while the other draws the inferences therefrom and is liable to make mistakes. The Mystics identified the synderesis as the point in the spirit of man at which it can be brought into contact and connection with the Spirit of God.

2. Reformation and After

At the Reformation the conscience was much in the mouths of men, both because the terrors of conscience formed a preparation for comprehending justification by faith and because, in appearing before principalities and powers in vindication of their action, the Reformers took their stand on conscience, as Luther did so memorably at the Diet of Worms; and the assertion of the rights of conscience has ever since been a conspicuous testimony of Protestantism; whereas Romanists, especially as represented by the Jesuits, have treated the conscience as a feeble and ignorant thing, requiring to be led by authority – that is, by themselves. The forms of medievalism long clung even to Protestant literature on this subject. It may not be surprising to find a High Churchman like Jeremy Taylor, in his Ductor Dubitantium, discussing ethics as a system of cases of conscience, but it is curious to find a Puritan like Baxter (in his Christian Directory), and a Scottish Presbyterian like David Dickson (in his Therapeutica Sacra) doing the same. Deism in England and the Enlightenment in Germany magnified the conscience, to which they ascribed such a power of revealing God as made any further revelation unnecessary; but the practical effect was a secularization and vulgarization of the general mind; and it was against these rather than the system which had produced them that Butler in England and Kant in Germany had to raise the standard of a spiritual view of life. The former said of the conscience that, if it had power as it had right, it would absolutely govern the world; and Kant’s sublime saying is well known, at the close of his great work on Ethics: Two things fill the soul with ever new and growing wonder and reverence, the oftener and the longer reflection continues to occupy itself with them – the starry heavens above and the moral law within. The rise of an Associational and Developmental Philosophy in England, represented by such powerful thinkers as the Mills, father and son, Professor Bain and Herbert Spencer, tended to dissipate the halo surrounding the conscience, by representing it as merely an emotional equivalent for the authority of law and the claims of custom, so stamped on the mind by the experience of generations that, its earthly source forgotten, it came to be attributed to supernatural powers. But this school was antagonized with success by such thinkers as Martineau and T. H. Green. R. Rothe regarded conscience as a term too popular and of too variable signification to be of much use in philosophical speculation; but most of the great succession of writers on Christian ethics who followed him have treated it seriously; Dorner especially recognizing its importance, and Newman Smyth bestowing on it a thoroughly modern treatment. Among German works on the subject that of Gass, which contains an appendix on the history of the term synderesis, is deserving of special attention; that by Khler is unfinished, as is also the work in English by Robertson; The Christian Conscience by Davison is slight and popular. Weighty discussions will be found in two books on Moral Philosophy – the Handbook of Calderwood, and the Ethics of Mezes. But there is abundance of room for a great monograph on the subject, which would treat conscience in a comprehensive manner as the subjective standard of conduct, formed by progressive familiarity with the objective standards as well as by practice in accordance with its own authority and with the will of God.

Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

Conscience

The conscious knowledge of good and evil. This resulted from the fall of Adam. He could have had no knowledge of good and evil before any evil was there. It is remarkable that the word conscience does not occur in the O.T. In the N.T. the word is , lit. ‘joint-knowledge.’ This agrees with what God said of Adam after the fall, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” Gen 3:22. The above word occurs once in the LXX in Ecc 10:20: “Curse not the king, no not in thy conscience.” This knowledge of good and evil is universal: some of the most benighted heathen, for instance, have owned that they knew such things as stealing were wrong. They are thus ‘a law to themselves:’ their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts accusing or excusing themselves between themselves. Rom 2:14-15. The law gave more light as to what was right and wrong: Paul said, “I had not had conscience also of lust unless the law had said, Thou shalt not lust.” Rom 7:7. Christianity brings the conscience into the light of God, fully revealed by His word; the believer is thus exercised to have a conscience void of offence towards God and men. This may be called a ‘tender conscience.’ Act 24:16.

Scripture speaks of

1. a ‘good conscience,’ enabling one when accused of evil, to know that the charge is untrue. 1Pe 3:16.

2. a ‘pure conscience,’ which is characterised by the separation from evil. 1Ti 3:9.

3. a ‘weak conscience,’ as on the subject of meats, days, etc. 1Co 8:7.

4. a ‘purged conscience.’ Through faith in the infinite efficacy of the blood of Christ the believer has no more conscience of sins. This does not mean no consciousness of ever sinning, but that as regards imputation of sins before God, the conscience is purged. Paul speaks of some who have a ‘defiled mind and conscience,’ Tit 1:15; and of others who in departing from the faith have their ‘conscience seared with a hot iron,’ 1Ti 4:2, that is, a hardened conscience, insensible to that which should touch them to the quick.

Conscience, with the Christian, should be exercised in the sight of God fully revealed in Christ, and be governed by the word, otherwise, on the plea of ‘conscience,’ many actions displeasing to God way be advocated. This is exemplified in the case of Paul before his conversion. He could say that he had lived in all good conscience before God, and yet he had been haling men and women to prison because they were Christians. Doubtless he did it with an unoffending conscience, according as the Lord stated: “The time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.” Joh 16:2. Paul’s zeal for Judaism so blinded his eyes that he was unable to recognise in his conscience the God who gave the law, and had sent His Son also; nor to see that God could act outside of it: it was an unenlightened conscience, a zeal without knowledge, by which even the Christian may be led astray.

Fuente: Concise Bible Dictionary

Conscience

General references

Job 15:21; Job 15:24; Job 27:6; Pro 20:12; Mat 6:22-23; Luk 11:33-36; Mat 5:15-16; Act 23:1; Act 24:16; Rom 2:14-15; Rom 7:15-23; Rom 9:1; Rom 14:1-23; 1Co 8:7; 1Co 8:9-13; 1Co 10:27-32; 2Co 1:12; 2Co 4:2; 2Co 5:11; 1Ti 1:5; 1Ti 1:19; 1Ti 3:9; Heb 9:14; Heb 10:22; Heb 13:18; 1Pe 2:19; 1Pe 3:16; 1Pe 3:21; 1Jn 3:20-21

Faithful, instances of:

– Pharaoh, when he took Abraham’s wife for a concubine

Gen 12:18-19

– Abimelech, when he took Isaac’s wife for a concubine

Gen 26:9-11

– Jacob, in his care of Laban’s property

Gen 31:39

– Joseph, when Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him

Gen 39:7-12

– Nehemiah, in the matter of taxes

Neh 5:15

– Daniel, in refusing to eat of the King’s meat and wine

Dan 1:8

– Peter, in declaring the whole counsel of God

Act 4:19-20; Act 5:29 Honesty; Integrity

Guilty

– General references

Job 15:21; Job 15:24; Psa 51:1-4; Psa 51:7-14; Psa 73:21; Pro 28:1; Isa 59:9-14; Mat 27:3-5; Mar 6:14; Mar 6:16; Mat 14:1-2; Joh 8:9; Act 2:37; 1Ti 4:2; Tit 1:15; Heb 9:14; Heb 10:26-27

– Instances of:

b Adam and Eve, after they sinned

Gen 3:7-8

b Jacob, after he defrauded Esau

Gen 33:1-12

b Joseph’s brethren

Gen 42:21; Gen 44:16

b Pharaoh, after the plagues

Exo 9:27

b Micah, after stealing

Jdg 17:2

b David:

b For having cut off Saul’s skirt

1Sa 24:5

b For having numbered the children of Israel

2Sa 24:10

b For his adultery, and murder of Uriah

Psa 32:1-11; Psa 38; Psa 40:11-12; Psa 51

b Joab, for numbering Israel

1Ch 21:1-7

b The lepers of Samaria

2Ki 7:8-10

b The old prophet of Beth-El

1Ki 13:29-32

b Herod, for beheading John the Baptist

Mat 14:2; Luk 9:7

b Peter, after denying the Lord

Mat 26:75; Mar 14:72; Luk 22:62

b Judas, after betraying the Lord

Mat 27:3-5

b The accusers of the woman taken in adultery

Joh 8:9

Dead

– General references

Pro 16:25; Pro 30:20; Jer 6:15; Amo 6:1; Amo 6:3-6; Joh 16:2-3; Rom 1:21-25; Eph 4:17-19; 1Ti 4:2; Tit 1:15 Blindness, Spiritual

Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible

Conscience

(Lat. conscientia, knowledge) Any emotionally-toned experience in which a tendency to act is inhibited by a recognition, socially conditioned, that suffering evil consequences is likely to result from acting on the impulse to act. — A.J.B.

Fuente: The Dictionary of Philosophy

CONSCIENCE

(1) General References to

Act 23:1; Rom 2:15; Rom 13:5; 1Co 8:7; 1Co 10:25; 2Co 5:11; Heb 9:14; Heb 10:22

(2) A good Conscience

Act 24:16; Rom 9:1; 2Co 1:12; 1Ti 1:15; 1Ti 1:19; 1Ti 3:9; Heb 13:18

1Pe 2:19; 1Pe 3:16

(3) Guilty
Joseph’s Brethren

Gen 42:21

Pharaoh

Exo 9:27

Ezra

Ezr 9:6; Job 15:21

The Psalmist

Psa 40:12

Belshazzar

Dan 5:6

The Scribes and Pharisees

Joh 8:9

–SEE Remorse, GUILT

Condemnation, CONDEMNATION
Sin’s Shame, DISHONOUR

Fuente: Thompson Chain-Reference Bible

Conscience

lit., “a knowing with” (sun, “with,” oida, “to know”), i.e., “a co-knowledge (with oneself), the witness borne to one’s conduct by conscience, that faculty by which we apprehend the will of God, as that which is designed to govern our lives;” hence (a) the sense of guiltness before God; Heb 10:2; (b) that process of thought which distinguishes what it considers morally good or bad, commending the good, condemning the bad, and so prompting to do the former, and avoid the latter; Rom 2:15 (bearing witness with God’s law); Heb 9:1; 2Co 1:12; acting in a certain way because “conscience” requires it, Rom 13:5; so as not to cause scruples of “conscience” in another, 1Co 10:28-29; not calling a thing in question unnecessarily, as if conscience demanded it, 1Co 10:25, 1Co 10:27; “commending oneself to every man’s conscience,” 2Co 4:2; cp. 2Co 5:11. There may be a “conscience” not strong enough to distinguish clearly between the lawful and the unlawful, 1Co 8:7, 1Co 8:10, 1Co 8:12 (some regard consciousness as the meaning here). The phrase “conscience toward God,” in 1Pe 2:19, signifies a “conscience” (or perhaps here, a consciousness) so controlled by the apprehension of God’s presence, that the person realizes that griefs are to be borne in accordance with His will. Heb 9:9 teaches that sacrifices under the Law could not so perfect a person that he could regard himself as free from guilt. For various descriptions of “conscience” see Act 23:1; Act 24:16; 1Co 8:7; 1Ti 1:5, 1Ti 1:19; 1Ti 3:9; 1Ti 4:2; 2Ti 1:3; Tit 1:15; Heb 9:14; Heb 10:22; Heb 13:18; 1Pe 3:16, 1Pe 3:21.

Fuente: Vine’s Dictionary of New Testament Words

Conscience

is that principle, power, or faculty within us, which decides on the merit or demerit of our own actions, feelings, or affections, with reference to the rule of God’s law. It has been called the moral sense by Lord Shaftsbury and Dr. Hutcheson. This appellation has been objected to by some, but has been adopted and defended by Dr. Reid, who says, The testimony of our moral faculty, like that of the external senses, is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reason to rely upon it. He therefore considers conscience as an original faculty of our nature, which decides clearly, authoritatively, and instantaneously, on every object that falls within its province. As we rely, says he, upon the clear and distinct testimony of our eyes, concerning the colours and figures of the bodies about us, we have the same reason to rely, with security, upon the clear and unbiassed testimony of our conscience, with regard to what we ought and ought not to do. But Dr. Reid is surely unfortunate in illustrating the power of conscience by the analogy of the external senses. With regard to the intimations received through the organs of sense, there can be no difference of opinion, and there can be no room for argument. They give us at once correct information, which reasoning can neither invalidate nor confirm. But it is surely impossible to say as much for the power of conscience, which sometimes gives the most opposite intimations with regard to the simplest moral facts, and which requires to be corrected by an accurate attention to the established order of nature, or to the known will of God, before we can rely with confidence on its decisions. It does not appear, that conscience can with propriety be considered as a principle distinct from that which enables us to pronounce on the general merit or demerit of moral actions. This principle, or faculty, is attended with peculiar feelings, when we ourselves are the agents; we are then too deeply interested to view the matter as a mere subject of reasoning; and pleasure or pain are excited, with a degree of intensity proportioned to the importance which we always assign to our own interests and feelings. In the case of others, our approbation or disapprobation is generally qualified, sometimes suspended, by our ignorance of the motives by which they have been influenced; but, in our own case, the motives and the actions are both before us, and when they do not correspond, we feel the same disgust with ourselves that we should feel toward another, whose motives we knew to be vicious, while his actions are specious and plausible. But in our own case, the uneasy feeling is heightened in a tenfold degree, because self- contempt and disgust are brought into competition with the warmest self- love, and the strongest desire of self-approbation. We have then something of the feelings of a parent, who knows the worthlessness of the child he loves, and contemplates with horror the shame and infamy which might arise from exposure to the world.

2. Conscience, then, cannot be considered as any thing else than the general principle of moral approbation or disapprobation applied to our own feelings or conduct, acting with increased energy from the knowledge which we have of our motives and actions, and from the deep interest which we take in whatever concerns ourselves; nor can we think that they have deserved well of morals or philosophy, who have attempted to deduce our notions of right and wrong from any one principle. Various powers both of the understanding and of the will are concerned in every moral conclusion; and conscience derives its chief and most salutary influence from the consideration of our being continually in the presence of God, and accountable to him for all our thoughts, words, and actions. A conscience well informed, and possessed of sensibility, is the best security for virtue, and the most awful avenger of wicked deeds; an ill-informed conscience is the most powerful instrument of mischief; a squeamish and ticklish conscience generally renders those who are under its influence ridiculous.

Hic murus aheneus esto,

Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa.

(Let a consciousness of innocence, and a fearlessness of any accusation, be thy brazen bulwark.)

3. The rule of conscience is the will of God, so far as it is made known to us, either by the light of nature, or by that of revelation. With respect to the knowledge of this rule, conscience is said to be rightly informed, or mistaken; firm, or wavering, or scrupulous, &c. With respect to the conformity of our actions to this rule when known, conscience is said to be good or evil. In a moral view, it is of the greatest importance that the understanding be well informed, in order to render the judgment or verdict of conscience a safe directory of conduct, and a proper source of satisfaction. Otherwise, the judgment of conscience may be pleaded, and it has actually been pleaded, as an apology for very unwarrantable conduct. Many atrocious acts of persecution have been perpetrated, and afterward justified, under the sanction of an erroneous conscience. It is also of no small importance, that the sensibility of conscience be duly maintained and cherished; for want of which men have often been betrayed into criminal conduct without self-reproach, and have deluded themselves with false notions of their character and state.

See MORAL OBLIGATION.

CONSCIENCE

Fuente: American Tract Society Bible Dictionary

Conscience

Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church

CONSCIENCE

Fuente: Theological Dictionary

conscience

Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary

Conscience

Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia

Conscience

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Conscience (2)

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Conscience

Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Conscience

Fuente: Synonyms of the Old Testament

CONSCIENCE

Fuente: Bridgeway Bible Dictionary

Conscience

Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible

Conscience

Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

Conscience

Fuente: Concise Bible Dictionary

Conscience

Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible

Conscience

Fuente: The Dictionary of Philosophy

CONSCIENCE

Fuente: Thompson Chain-Reference Bible

Conscience

Fuente: Vine’s Dictionary of New Testament Words

Conscience

Fuente: Biblical and Theological Dictionary