red its standards, then conscience comes in to
freshen the ideals and to smite vice and vulgarity. In these luminous
hours when conscience causes the deeper convictions to prevail, how
beautiful seem truth and purity and justice! How does the soul revolt
from iniquity, even as the eye revolts from the slough or the nostril
from filth!

Conscience has also relations to judgment. It pronounces upon the
inner motive that colors the deeds, for it is the motive within that
makes the actions without right or wrong. When Coleridge, the
schoolboy, was going along the street thinking of the story of Hero
and Leander and imagining himself to be swimming the Hellespont, he
threw wide his arms as though breasting the waves. Unfortunately, his
hand struck the pocket of a passer-by and knocked out a purse. The
outer deed was that of a pickpocket and could have sent the youth to
jail. The inner motive was that of an imaginative youth deeply
impressed by the story he was translating from the Greek, and that
inner motive made the owner of the purse his friend and sent young
Coleridge to college. Thus, the philosopher tells us, the motive made
what was outwardly wrong to be inwardly right.

Memory, too, is influenced by the moral Faculty. Memory gathers up all
our yesterdays. Often her writing is invisible, like that of a penman
writing with lemon juice, taking note of each transgression and
recording words that will appear when held up to the heat of fire.
Very strangely does conscience bring out the processes of memory. Sir
William Hamilton tells of a little child brought to England at four
years of age. When a few brief summers and winters had passed over his
head, the language of far-off Russia had passed completely out of the
child's mind. Seventy years afterward, stricken with his last illness,
in his delirium the man spoke with perfect ease in the language of
childhood. In moments of extreme excitement, when ships go down or
death is imminent, conscience doth so quicken the mind that all the
deeds and thoughts of an entire career are reviewed within a few
minutes. Scholars have been deeply impressed with this unique fact.
Seeking to interpret it, Walter Scott takes us into the castle where a
foul murder was committed. So deeply did the red current stain the
floor that, though the servants scrubbed and scrubbed and planed and
planed, still the dull red stains oozed up through the oaken planks.
This is the great Scotchman's way of