oes, and its advice continues, it may
indeed molest, but it will no longer direct us. Now, though the voice of
conscience may, as the positive school say, survive their analysis of
it, its authority will not. That authority has always taken the form of
a menace, as well as of an approval; and the menace at any rate, upon
all positive principles, is nothing but big words that can break no
bones. As soon as we realise it to be but this, its effect must cease
instantly. The power of conscience resides not in what we hear it to be,
but in what we believe it to be. A housemaid may be deterred from going
to meet her lover in the garden, because a howling ghost is believed to
haunt the laurels; but she will go to him fast enough when she discovers
that the sounds that alarmed her were not a soul in torture, but the cat
in love. The case of conscience is exactly analogous to this.

And now let us turn again to the case in question. Men of such a
character as I have been just describing may find conscience quite equal
to giving a glow, by its approval, to their virtuous wishes; but they
will find it quite unequal to sustaining them against their vicious
ones; and the more vigorous the intellect of the man, the more feeble
will be the power of conscience. When a man is very strongly tempted to
do a thing which he believes to be wrong, it is almost inevitable that
he will test to the utmost the reasons of this belief; or if he does not
do this before he yields to the temptation, yet if he does happen to
yield to it, he will certainly do so after. Thus, unless we suppose
human nature to be completely changed, and all our powers of observation
completely misleading, the inward condition of the class in question is
this. However calm the outer surface of their lives may seem, under the
surface there is a continual discord; and also, though they alone may
perceive it, a continued decadence. In various degrees they all yield to
temptation; all men in the vigour of their manhood do; and conscience
still fills them with its old monitions and reproaches. But it cannot
enforce obedience. They feel it to be the truth, but at the same time
they know it to be a lie; and though they long to be coerced by it, they
find it cannot coerce them. Reason, which was once its minister, is now
the tribune of their passions, and forbids them, in times of passion,
to submit to it. They are not suffered to forget that it is not what it
says it is, that