_It never came from on high,
And never rose from below_:

and they cannot help chiding themselves with the irrepressible
self-reproach,

_Am I to be overawed
By what I cannot but know,
Is a juggle born of the brain?_

Thus their conscience, though not stifled, is dethroned; it is become a
fugitive Pretender; and that part of them that would desire its
restoration is set down as an intellectual _malignant_, powerless indeed
to restore its sovereign.

_Invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas._

Conscience, in short, as soon as its power is needed, is like their own
selves dethroned within themselves, wringing its hands over a rebellion
it is powerless to suppress. And then, when the storm is over, when the
passions again subside, and their lives once more return to their wonted
channels, it can only come back humbly and dejected, and give them in a
timid voice a faint, dishonoured blessing.

Such lives as these are all of them really in a state of moral
consumption. The disease in its earlier stage is a very subtle one; and
it may not be generally fatal for years, or even for generations. But
it is a disease that can be transmitted from parent to child; and its
progress is none the less sure because it is slow; nor is it less fatal
and painful because it may often give a new beauty to the complexion. On
various constitutions it takes hold in various ways, and its presence is
first detected by the sufferer under various trials, and betrayed to the
observer by various symptoms. What I have just been describing is the
action that is at the root of it; but with the individual it does not
always take that form. Often indeed it does; but oftener still perhaps
it is discovered not in the helpless yet reluctant yielding to vice, but
in the sadness and the despondency with which virtue is practised--in
the dull leaden hours of blank endurance or of difficult endeavour; or
in the little satisfaction that, when the struggle has ceased, the
reward of struggle brings with it.

An earlier, and perhaps more general symptom still, is one that is not
personal. It consists not in the way in which men regard themselves, but
in the way in which they regard others. In their own case, their
habitual desire of right, and their habitual aversion to wrong, may have
been enough to keep them from any open breach with conscience, or from
putting it to an open shame. But its precarious position is revealed t