Daily Devotionals

Devotional: September 21st

THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE

I remember God, and am disquieted: I complain, and my spirit is overwhelmed. - Psalms 73:3

You carry - no matter whence it came, or how it was developed; that is of no consequence, you have got it - you carry a conscience, that is not altogether silent in any man, I suppose, and that certainly is not altogether dead in you. Its awful voice speaks many a time in the silence of the night, and in the depths of your own heart, and tells you that there are evil things in your past and a page black in your biography which you can do nothing to cancel or to erase the stains from or to tear out. " What I have written I have written." And so long as memory holds her place, and conscience is not shattered altogether, there needs no other hell to make the punishment of the evil-doer. You need a refuge from the stings of the true indictments of your own consciences.

Your conscience is a prophet. It is not, nowadays, fashionable to preach about the Day of Judgment - more’s the pity, I think. We say that every one of us shall give an account of ourselves to God. Have you ever tried to believe that about yourself, and to realise what it means? Think that all, down to the oozy depths that we are ashamed to look at ourselves, shall be spread out before the "pure eyes and perfect judgment of the all-judging" God. Oh! brother, you will need a refuge, "that you may have boldness before Him in the Day of Judgment." These things that I have been speaking about, external ills, ungoverned self, the accusations of conscience, which is the voice of God, and that future to which we are all driving as fast as we can - these things are truths; and, being truths, they should enter in, as operative facts, into your lives. My question is. Have they done so?

You need a refuge; have you ever calmly contemplated the necessity? Oh! do not let that dogged ignorance of the facts bewitch you any longer. Do not let the consequential levity that cannot see an inch beyond its nose hide from you the realities of our own condition. People in the prisons, during the September massacres of the French Revolution, used to amuse themselves, although the tumbrils were coming for some of them tomorrow morning, and the headsman was waiting for them - used to amuse themselves as if they were free, and got up entertainments with a ghastly mockery of joy. That is something like what some of us do. One has seen a mule going down an Alpine pass, ambling quite comfortably along, with one foot over a precipice, and a thousand feet to fall if it slips. That is how some of us travel along the road. Sheep will nibble the grass, stretching their stupid necks a little bit further to get an especially succulent tuft on the edge of the cliffs, with eight hundred feet and a crawling sea at the bottom of it to receive them if they stumble. Do not be like that. " Be ye not as the horses or the mules that have no understanding," but look the facts in the face, and do not be content till you have acted as they prescribe.

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