CONSCIENCE AND DUTY.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 1, 1 October 1883, Page 11

CONSCIENCE AND DUTY.

A Wellington correspondent sends us the following :

“ I have a word to say about your prospectus, and which is not meant to be in any way ill-natured. Yon say you will have ‘no creed but conscience. ’ Now I would ask you, whose conscience is to be your creed ? Because it seems to me that the individual conscience is indefinitely elastic, nothing appearing too unjust to it when self-interest is concerned. If you take the collective conscience, you will find it just as accommodating. “ You say your standard of Faith will be to * advocate the Right and True.’ Now it does not seem to me that there is anything specially Freethinking about this ; it does not seem that you have improved upon the text ‘ Do unto others as you would be done by,’ and its practical illustration, the story of the good Samaritan. “ You can put me down as a subscriber, when I will look for an answer to this,”

: [Our Christian friend, in misapprehending conscience, falls into a rather obvious error. What “ appears ” “ unjust ” to conscience, so far from being a part of conscience, is opposed to it, and is a testimony to the validity of its moral authority. Moreover, if the term “ elastic conscience ” is anything more than cant or slang, it is a self-contradiction. When through self-interest something is done which the conscience disapproves, the conscience is not stretched but violated. To the query, “ Whose conscience we accept as the moral standard in the place of creeds—we reply, each individual conscience, as the highest moral tribunal to which its possessor can appeal. It may be rudimentary, crude, and uncultivated, yet its sanction to the individual is not thereby weakened. Knowledge is the only means by which the ideal conscience may be approached. Christians appropriate the injunction “ Do unto others,” though it dates beyond the Christian era, and the thought is not specially Semitic. Nor is it perfect as a moral guide. The persecutor, for instance, was not prevented from perpetrating acts of cruelty on the heretic, since he could not conceive himself a heretic, and therefore could not apply the precept. The Crand Inquisitor might himself say that if he were a heretic, he ought to be burned, and that he was doing to another in burning him, as he would be “ done by,” if he were in that other’s position. As a precept it is devious, and means no more than that one shall not do that which he believes to be wrong. The consciousness of right and wrong is the direct incentive, “do unto others” the indirect, to act uprightly.

Both ave fallible, and require the same kind of enlightenment. We therefore think the terms questioned appropriate and valid, though we did not intend them to be exhaustive in marking the distinctions between Free thought and Oh vis--0 ” o 1 UicUlitJ . j