The All-Seeing Eye

The human heart, when left to itself, confesses the omniscience of Jehovah. Without the testimony of revelation, we have enough in the testimony of its opponents to convince us that what they affect to deny, is still believed, in spite of themselves. This testimony has been unwillingly rendered by them in many an hour of sudden peril and calamity. The secret haunts of iniquity have listened to it; and the dying chamber of the infidel has re-echoed it. It is confirmed by the thief, who trembles over the bag of gold which he has stolen. It is confirmed by the murderer, in the upbraidings of a con-THE ALL-SEEINa EYE. 97

science wliicli will not “down at his bidding.” There wns no mortal who saw him commit the murder. Perhaps he did the deed in the depths of a vast forest-No ear heard the death-groan of his victim — and ’ dead men tell no tales.’ But still there is a voice crjdng to him from the ground that tells him he is seen! that there is an //-Seeing Eye, which, piercing through the silent heavens, penetrates to the very bottom of his blood-stained soul. This harrowing consciousness follows him wherever he goes. And solitude becomes no solitude to him! He is ever in the broad glare of an intelligence that reads him and his guilty secret through and through. The whole air is alive; and every rustling leaf and passing wind sound to him like the coming footsteps of a vengeance sent upon him by an omniscient God.

Herein lies the power of conscience. It is based on a sense of some Superior Being to whom we are amenable, and who is acqnainted with all our actions. This feeling acts like an instinct. It is impossible to argue it down; it is impossible to delude it into silence. Under its influence, when fairly aroused, the strongest intellect quails; and sometimes it unseats the reason from its throne. We occasionally read of men who return secretly to revenue officers, or to others with whom they have transacted business, considerable sums of money, unlawfully obtained. It was not from the fear of human detection; for that danger had entirely passed away. It was from the harrowing sense of Almighty detection — from the goadings of an aroused and unappeasable conscience. In one of our insane asylums, a man was for a long time confined, who did nothing but pace up and down his cell, and then turn upon his heel, and give the word to “Fire /” He had killed his antagonist in a duel, and gone crazy under the remorse occasioned by the bloody deed. That was the power of conscience! Why is it that the hardened profligate, when brought to the brink of the grave, is visited oftentimes by the most heart-rending compunction? Why does he seek to shut out the sight of the past, that comes thickening up before him — and why does he quail at the mention of the awful future? It is the power of conscience which informs him that all his sins have been open to the eye of that Jehovah whose very existence he has oft endeavored, with a well-assumed bravery, to deny! But now his pallid face and trembling lips confess the base imposture, and tell what his lying heart had long sought to conceal, that he believes in an All-seeing God! His most secret sins he already beholds reflected in the frown of an angry Judge; and trembles at the thought that they are yet to be the spectacle of an assembled universe. Vain man to suppose — what we are all too prone to imagine — that there is any sin which is secret. What is a sin? Is it not a breach of the law of the Most High — an offence committed against Him — and if He but sees it, what matters it how many or how few of my fellow-worms are spectators of the act? Secret sins! Flatter not thyself, fellow-sinner, that thy chamber is a secret place — or even a privacy so deep that thy right hand knoweth not what thy left hand doeth. The eye of God is there. It strikes through thy very soul — and knows thy half-formed thoughts before they have yet taken shape in thy own mind. When thou didst put that ill-gotten dollar into thy chest, God saw the theft, and marked that dollar with a rust that shall eat into thy very soul! When thou didst keep back the truth. His flame-bright eye beheld the lie lurking black in the bottom of thy heart! When in thy closet, thou didst mumble a careless prayer to cheat thine own conscience, Grod beheld the mockery-, for “false lips are an abomination unto Him!” “Surely,” as Jeremy Taylor has it — “if we would always remember that Jehovah is the great eye of the world, ever beholding our actions, and an ever open ear to hear all our words, and an unwearied arm, ever lifted up to crush a sinner into ruin, it would cause much sin to cease from among us, and make us more like those who continually walk in the light before his throne.”