idelities
toward friendships and business and duty. At other times conscience
has had unique manifestations in fidelity toward creeds. Now one
denomination and now another, forgetting to be conscientious in
meeting together for days and weeks to plan in the interests of the
pauper, the orphans, the tenement house or the foreign district in the
great city, will through months of excitement exhibit conscience
toward some doctrinal symbol. Witness the recent upheaval about
inspiration. As water bubbling up through the spring was once rain
that fell from the sky, so the truth coming through the lips of poet
or prophet was first breathed into the heart by God. Recently a good
professor thought more emphasis should be laid upon the human spring.
But his opponents thought the emphasis should be placed upon the sky,
from which the rain fell. In the broil about the nature of the water,
the spring itself was soiled, much mud stirred up, until multitudes
wholly forgot the spring, and many knew not whether there was any
water of life.

But conscience in some, means fidelity to what man and God did--not
what God is doing or will do. When the flowing sap under the stimulus
of the sun causes the tree to grow and splits the bark, men rejoice
that the bark is rent and that new and larger growths must be
inserted. Sometimes a child, long feeble and sickly, enters upon a
period of very rapid growth. Soon the boy's old clothes are too small,
and so is his hat. But what if the parents should remember only that
the clothes and hat came from some famous pattern? What if in their
zeal to preserve the hat they should put an iron band about the boy's
forehead and never permit it to increase so that the hat would not
fit? What if they should put a strait-jacket about the chest to
restrain the stature? This would show great zeal toward the hat and
the coat, but meanwhile what is to become of the boy? Strange that men
should be so conscientious toward an intellectual symbol, but forget
to give liberty to other men's consciences who day and night seek to
please God and be true to their beliefs. Thus in a thousand ways
conscience is partial and fragmentary in its workings. Only one
full-orbed man has ever trod our earth!

God's crowning gift to man is the gift of conscience. Reason is a
noble and kingly faculty, turning reveries into orations and
conversations into books. Imagination is a stately and divine gift,
turning thoughts into poems and bl