epare by special concentration of spirit for my Holy Communion, I
get some dim notions of what Conscience might effect in me if it had a
free hand. In THAT life of close spiritual concentration, when the
outer world is shut off and the soul enters into its own deepest
recesses, contemplating itself, contemplating its past and its future,
contemplating the deep tender love of Him who is there present as in
Palestine long ago, and feeling that in spite of all my shameful
ingratitude He is loving me and blessing me and watching tenderly over
me--surely I may expect great things of the operation of Conscience in
me.

MEMORY in this life is a very wonderful thing. It can call up in a
moment, for Conscience to work on, pictures of half a century ago. But
in the fast crowding impressions on the senses Memory is overtaxed and
has to lay away in its storehouse of subconsciousness whole tracts of
the past which never rise up before my conscious thought at all.
Psychological science has much to say in late years about this
storehouse of subconscious memory and the power that, unknown to me, it
is exerting on my life. It is there all the time, "under the
threshold." These buried memories are alive, ready to spring up, but
asleep--in abeyance.

Section 3

Now think what this means for Conscience and for Memory as the handmaid
of Conscience in the great contemplative life after Death. There is no
good or evil thing that I have ever done but Conscience has pronounced
on. Some of these judgments I remember. Some of them I forget. In
the many distractions of life and the desire to escape painful
thoughts, there has dropped down under the threshold of my conscious
thought a vast store of memories of which I am oblivious, but of which
one and another and another springs up at times unexpectedly with a
startling reminder of the great hidden store behind. I meet by chance
an old friend of my boyhood, and as he talks about the old times,
picture after picture springs up into the light, memories which had
long gone from me and which would never have sprung up from "under the
threshold" but for the chance stimulation of his talk.

We have often heard of drowning people on the verge of death having the
forgotten memories of half a lifetime flashed back in a moment. An old
friend once told me a curious experience. "I was crossing a railway
line hurriedly on a wet day. As I rushed over the rails the Express
came in view. I sl