opposition of a will that battles against an oppressing influence. In
moral matters, defeat can never be condoned, no matter how great the
struggle, if there is a final yielding of the will; but the
circumstance of energetic defense stands to a man's credit and will
protect him from much of the blame and disgrace due to defeat.

Thus we see that the first quality of the acts of a moral agent is that
he think, desire, say and do with knowledge and free consent. Such
acts, and only such, can be called good or bad. What makes them good
and bad, is another question.

CHAPTER III.
CONSCIENCE.

THE will of God, announced to the world at large, is known as the Law
of God; manifested to each individual soul, it is called conscience.
These are not two different rules of morality, but one and the same
rule. The latter is a form or copy of the former. One is the will of
God, the other is its echo in our souls.

We might fancy God, at the beginning of all things, speaking His will
concerning right and wrong, in the presence of the myriads of souls
that lay in the state of possibility. And when, in the course of time,
these souls come into being, with unfailing regularity, at every act,
conscience, like a spiritual phonograph, gives back His accents and
reechoes: "it is lawful," or "it is not lawful." Or, to use another
simile, conscience is the compass by which we steer aright our moral
lives towards the haven of our souls' destination in eternity. But just
as behind the mariner's compass is the great unseen power, called
attraction, under whose influence the needle points to the star; so
does the will or Law of God control the action of the conscience, and
direct it faithfully towards what is good.

We have seen that, in order to prevaricate it is not sufficient to
transgress the Law of God: we must know; conscience makes us know. It
is only when we go counter to its dictates that we are constituted
evil-doers. And at the bar of God's justice, it is on the testimony of
conscience that sentence will be passed. Her voice will be that of a
witness present at every deed, good or evil, of our lives.

Conscience should always tell the truth, and tell it with certainty.
Practically, this is not always the case. We are sometimes certain that
a thing is right when it is really wrong. There are therefore two kinds
of conscience: a true and a certain conscience, and they are far from
being one and the same thing. A true conscien