mortality and responsibility were clear as noonday. Holding a
thousand swords in her hand, conscience attacked the guilty king. Then
were fulfilled Plato's words: "If we could examine the heart of a
king, we would find it full of scars and black wounds." For no slave
was ever marked by his master's scourge as Herod's heart was lashed by
his conscience.

Socrates told his disciples that the facts of conscience must be
reckoned with as certainly as the facts of fire or wood or water. None
may deny the condemnation that weighed upon the soul of Herod or
Judas, or the approval of conscience that transfigured the face of the
martyred Stephen or Savonarola. For all happiness comes only through
peace with one's self, one's record, and one's God. All the great,
from AEschylus and Sophocles to Channing and Webster, have emphasized
man's conscience as the oracle divine. Let the witnesses speak. Here
is the Judge, famous in English history: It became his duty to
sentence a servant for murdering his master. Suddenly, before the
astounded onlookers, the Judge arose and took his place in the dock
beside the prisoner. He stated that, thirty years before, in a distant
province, he had taken the life and property of his master, and
thereby gained his present position and influence. Though he had never
been suspected of crime, he now begged his fellow Judges to condemn
him to the death unto which his conscience had long urged him. Here is
the student of man and things, Dr. Samuel Johnson: In his old and
honored age he goes back to Litchfield to stand with uncovered head
from morning till night in the market-place on the spot where fifteen
years before he had refused to keep his father's book-stall. Despite
the grotesque figure he made, midst the sneers and the rain,
conscience bade him expiate his breach of filial piety. And here is
Channing, the scholar and seer: A child of six years, he lifted his
stick to strike the tortoise, as he had seen older boys do. But in
that moment an inner voice whispered loud and clear: "It is wrong." In
his fright the boy hastened home to fling himself into his mother's
arms. "What was the voice?" he asked. To which his mother answered:
"Men call the voice conscience; but I prefer to call it the voice of
God. And always your happiness will depend upon obedience to that
little voice."

Here also is the great Persian Sadi. One day he found a good man in
the jungle, who had been attacked by a tiger and horr