Conscience
“The wi “ked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.” — xxviii. 1.
[0 man pursueth; and yet a pursuer is on the track of the fugitive, otherwise he would not flee. Pursuit and flight are in nature correlatives, and constitute an inseparable pair. Pursuit follows flight, or flight precedes pursuit, as an advancing body casts a dark shadow forward or backward according to the direction of the light. His own shadow may be, and often is, the most terrible pursuer that ever dogged the steps of a criminal. A swift foot does not avail the man who is fleeing from himself. When Cain shed his brother’s blood, no man pursued the murderer; yet he was pursued. He was hunted like a deer by dogs. His own apprehension was, “I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” Every bush that waved in the wind became the avenger of Abel, and made the life-blood curdle in Cain’s heart. This was the Lord’s doing in that early age; and the same method is still adopted in the government of the world. A man has committed murder, and successfully concealed his crime. No human eye but his own witnessed the deed; no other human ear heard the groans of the victim; no officer of justice arrested the perpetrator. Yet he is pursued and arrested: in some cases, his shadow-pursuers drag him in by force, and hand him over to the constituted authorities for trial: in other cases, they hold him in their own thin arms, and glare on him with their own fiery eyeballs, exacting, all his life long, a severer punishment than any that lies within the province of a human judge.
When they escape from man, God is the pursuer of the guilty. “If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.” He bows his heavens, and comes down for vengeance as well as for mercy. The “invisible God” has a way of making his presence felt. A reflector fixed in the human constitution points ever to its Author, as the magnet points to its pole, whatever the windings of life may be. With more or less of distinctness, this mirror receives and reveals the frown or the smile that sits upon the Judge’s brow. Thus, in effect, God is present in every human breast. Conscience within a man is one extremity of an electric wire, whose other extremity is fastened to the judgment-seat. This apparatus brings the Judge and the criminal terribly near to each other; and if peace has not been restored, enmity in such close contact is intolerable.
Unable to tolerate it, the guilty betakes himself to flight. No man pursues him, yet he flees as if from armed legions. Whenever and wherever the fugitive may halt to recover breath, his pursuer is still at his heels. The reflector which he carries within himself ever points in one direction, and ever reveals the face of God. Although he should flee from human abodes, and dwell in the heart of earth’s deepest desert, the same sun would shine on him there, and the same mysterious tablet in his own soul would receive its burning beam. “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy!” “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
A man may be saved from death by seeing the reflection of danger in a mirror, when the danger itself could not be directly seen. The executioner with his weapon is stealthily approaching through a corridor of the castle to the spot where the devoted invalid reclines. In his musings the captive has turned his vacant eye towards a mirror on the wall, and the faithful witness reveals the impending stroke in time to secure the escape of the victim. It is thus that the mirror in a man’s breast has become in a sense the man’s saviour, by revealing the wrath to come before its coming. Happy they who take the warning, — happy they who turn and live! The truth-teller is troublesome, and men besmear its bright surface with the thick clay of various pollutions, that the light which glances from it may no longer go like a sharp sword through their bones. You may dim the surface of the glass so that it shall no longer be painfully bright, like a little sun lying on the ground; but your puny operation does not extinguish the great light that glows in heaven. Thus to trample conscience in the mire, so that it shall no longer reflect God’s holiness, does not discharge holiness from the character of God. He will come to judge the world, although the world madly silence the witness who tells of his coming.
Conscience is in many respects the most wonderful element in the constitution of man. It is the point of closest contact and most intimate communion between us and the Father of our spirits. None of the human faculties constitute so hard a problem in mental philosophy. It has never fully melted yet in the crucible of the metaphysical analyst. Considering its position and uses, we need not be surprised that it more thoroughly eludes our search than other faculties of our nature. Thereby chiefly God apprehends us: thereby chiefly we apprehend God.
By “the wicked” we must not understand only those who are reckoned criminals by human governments. If heathen darkness covers the people, or searing has gathered hard and thick round a man, nothing short of bulky crimes can disturb the conscience; but where the true light shines, his own sins may oppress the penitent while the neighbourhood rings with his praise. “We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” He who uttered that confession was probably reckoned a saint in the city where he lived. Light from God’s word without, and a quickened conscience within, revealed transgressions, like a cloud for number and for blackness, while the spectators saw nothing but virtue in the suppliant’s life. He has looked in upon his own heart, and back upon his past life, and upward to the righteous Judge, and forward to the great day, and in all the horizon swept by his straining eye no spot appears where conscience can find a resting-place.
Who shall stand between the fugitive and his pursuer? Who shall settle the controversy between an unclean conscience and a just God? The question points, as John did, to the Lamb of God who taketh sin away. There is one Mediator between God and man. Terrors are sent as messengers of mercy to arouse loiterers, and compel them to flee. While Lot lingered in Sodom, the angels were urgent. The urgency of the angels was irksome to Lot; but when the saved man looked from his refuge in the
CONSCIENCE.
mountain down upon the burning city, he was glad that the consuming fire passed before him as an image to terrify, before it fell from heaven in its substance to consume. The warning was troublesome, but it saved his life. It is better to be roughly awakened to safety, than to perish asleep. So think many now, in earth and in heaven, who in the day of mercy feared coming wrath, and fled from the wrath to come. The fugitive gets “boldness to enter into the holiest,” when he enters “by the blood of Jesus “(Heb.x. 19).