keen-eyed pedestrian stopped to take a second look
and, turning to do so, felt an instinctive pity for this burdened,
care-encumbered man, wending his way through the almost deserted
streets.

This gaze was unreturned and this sympathy unperceived. He was in one of
those fits of abstraction when the whole external universe with all its
beauties and sublimities has ceased to exist. His cup of misery was
full, he had lost all clue to the meaning of life and a single definite
idea had taken complete possession of his mind. It was that he was
doomed to pass his existence under a curse.

By the very nature of its being, the soul is keenly sensitive to
blessings and curses, and it is not alone the benediction of the mitred
priest that thrills the heart! That of the pauper upon whom we have
bestowed alms sometimes awakens in our bosom a hope and gladness out of
all proportion to the insignificant source from which it has proceeded.
Nor do we need to be cursed by the great and the powerful to feel a pang
of terror in our souls! Let but some helpless wretch whom we have
wronged commit his cause to heaven in a single syllable, and we shudder
as if we already heard the approach of those avenging feet which the
ancients said were shod with wool. The curse of the dead and impotent
beggar rang in the ears of the fugitive like the strokes of an alarm
bell. That deep sense of justice which had been formed in his early life
had been revivified and endowed with a resistless power.

At such moments as these through which he was passing man experiences no
doubt as to the nature and origin of conscience. He is as sure that the
terror aroused in his heart is the echo of the decision of some real and
awful tribunal as that the wave upon the shore is produced by some real
though invisible storm at sea, or the shadow on the mountain by some
palpable object between it and the sun.

The conscience is not only "a secretion in the brain," it is not only
the "accumulated observations of the universal man upon the phenomena of
the moral life," it is not only his study of the laws of cause and
effect distilled into maxims and forebodings; it is this, but it is more
than this--as every total is more than any of its parts. For every man
has something which is in him, but not of him. It resides within his
intelligence, but it is not so much the offspring of his intelligence as
an emissary that has taken up its residence there! This obscure
something