ery
conscientious toward absolution, but not at all toward the neighbor's
flocks and barns. In others conscience is largely superstition.
Recently an officer of our army found himself sitting beside his host
at a table containing thirteen guests. The soldier, who perhaps would
have braved death on the battle-field, was pricked by his conscience
for sitting at table where the guests numbered thirteen. But he was
afraid to die at the dinner-table. He believed that the great God who
makes suns and stars and blazing planets to fly from His hand as
sparks beneath the hammer of a smith, the god of Sirius and Orion,
always stopped his work at six o'clock to count the guests around each
table, and if he found perchance there were thirteen, then would lift
his arrow to the bow to let fly the deadly shaft upon these awful
sinners against the law of twelve chairs or fourteen.

Singularly enough, now and then an individual is conscientious toward
some charm, as in the case of a merchant who presently discovered that
he had left his buckeye at home. He had carried this for twenty years.
Had he forgotten to pray he would not have gone home to fall upon his
knees. Nature and God were in the merchant's counting-room, but not
the buckeye. So he hurriedly left his office to bring back the agent
that secured all his success and prosperity.

Then, there is a commercial conscience. Some men feel that the law of
right is chiefly binding upon a man in his business relations. They
exile themselves from home, break the laws of love and companionship
with the wife whom they have engaged to cherish and love, until they
become strangers to her. But conscience does not prick them. Home,
friends, music, culture, all these may be neglected--but the business,
never. Others there are whose consciences work largely toward the
home. When they cross their own thresholds they are genial, kind and
delightful. As hosts they are famed for their companionship. Dying,
their fame is gathered up by the expressions, "good husband, good
father, good provider." But they have no conscience toward the street.
They count other men their prey, being grasping, greedy and
avaricious. They feel about their fellows just as men do about the
timber in the forest. When a man wants timber for his house, he says,
"That is the tree I want," and the woodsman fells it and squares it
for the sill. Does he want stone for his foundations or marble for his
finishings? There are the r