yle of the prophets: Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, ere
I deny conscience, and disparage the sacred name of duty! Yes,
conscience is a reality; but God is in it: He it is who gives to it its
necessary basis and its indispensable support. The conscience is the
august voice of the Master of the universe. God has given us the light
of the understanding that we may see and comprehend some portions of the
works which He has created without us: a work there is for which He
would have us to be fellow-workers with Him. The heaven of stars is a
spectacle for the eyes of the body, a grander spectacle still for the
contemplation of the mind which has understood their wondrous mechanism.
We admire them; but if the stars failed to attract our admiration, no
one of them on that account would cease to trace its orbit. There is
another heaven, a heaven of loving stars and free, the sight of which is
one day to fill us with rapture, and the realization of which is to be
the work of our love and of our will. Before we contemplate it we must
make it; this is our high and awful privilege. The plan of the spiritual
heavens is deposited in the soul, and the utterances of the conscience
reveal it to the will. It is a law of justice and of love. This law is
evermore violated, because it is proposed to liberty, and liberty
rebels: it subsists evermore, because it is the work of the Almighty.
Humanity, in its strange destiny, has never ceased to outrage the rule
which it acknowledges, and to pronounce upon its own acts a ceaseless
condemnation. The laws which are investigated by the physical sciences
are the plan of the Creator realized in nature: the law proposed to
liberty is the plan of the Creator to be realized by the community of
minds. Such is the explanation of the conscience: God is its solid
foundation.

Duty and God, morality and religion, are inseparable principles; all the
efforts of a false philosophy have never succeeded, and never will
succeed, in disjoining them. Men will never be prevented from believing
that God is holy, and that His will is binding upon them: they will
never be prevented from believing that holiness is divine, and that the
will of God reveals itself in the admonitions of the conscience.
Therefore the progress of religion and the progress of morality are
closely united; the morality of a people depends above all on the idea
which it forms to itself of God. The conscience, in fact, at the same
ti