ould work if one went and did
exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?"

"That's not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or,
rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered."

"You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?"

"No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said to
hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong. 'Thou
shalt kill,' they hear it say, 'thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear false
witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy father and
thy mother,' and so on through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown
off or put on, as the case may be."

"How very hideous!" the second friend exclaimed. "It's like an emanation
from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It's been abolished."

"And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the voice
of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know what
the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do evil,
we know what to do with them."

"And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard the
same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?"

"Ah, it's hard to say. We haven't got to the bottom of such things yet.
Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make a
satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic
consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official
interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it
literally."

"That's very interesting," the second friend said. "Then it's your idea
that no one really prefers to do wrong?"

"Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead authority.
No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn't any purely
voluntary evil among the sane. When the 'wicked,' as we call them, do
wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right presently and
make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an evil-doer lives he
means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or
until he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg found that the
last state of sinners was insanity."

"Dreadful!"

"But I've always thought very few reached that state. There's this
curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that
inner voice, we are aesthetically prompted; it's a matter of taste as
well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean