real life.
Religious conviction gives us a general direction, but it stands aside
from many of these entangled struggles in the jungle of conscience.
Practice is often easier than a rule. In practice a lawyer will know
far more accurately than a hypothetical case can indicate, how far he is
bound to see his client through, and how far he may play the keeper of
his client's conscience. And nearly every day there happens instances
where the most subtle casuistry will fail and the finger of conscience
point unhesitatingly. One may have worried long in the preparation and
preliminaries of the issue, one may bring the case at last into the
final court of conscience in an apparently hopeless tangle. Then
suddenly comes decision.

The procedure of that silent, lit, and empty court in which a man states
his case to God, is very simple and perfect. The excuses and the special
pleading shrivel and vanish. In a little while the case lies bare and
plain.

8. THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE

The question of oaths of allegiance, acts of acquiescence in existing
governments, and the like, is one that arises at once with the
acceptance of God as the supreme and real King of the Earth. At the
worst Caesar is a usurper, a satrap claiming to be sovereign; at the
best he is provisional. Modern casuistry makes no great trouble for the
believing public official. The chief business of any believer is to do
the work for which he is best fitted, and since all state affairs are
to become the affairs of God's kingdom it is of primary importance that
they should come into the hands of God's servants. It is scarcely less
necessary to a believing man with administrative gifts that he should be
in the public administration, than that he should breathe and eat. And
whatever oath or the like to usurper church or usurper king has been
set up to bar access to service, is an oath imposed under duress. If it
cannot be avoided it must be taken rather than that a man should become
unserviceable. All such oaths are unfair and foolish things. They
exclude no scoundrels; they are appeals to superstition. Whenever an
opportunity occurs for the abolition of an oath, the servant of God will
seize it, but where the oath is unavoidable he will take it.

The service of God is not to achieve a delicate consistency of
statement; it is to do as much as one can of God's work.

9. THE PRIEST AND THE CREED

It may be doubted if this line of reasoning regarding t