-this "man within the breast," as the Stoics
called it--but the very articulate utterance of the supreme Reason
bidding man to live for the right? No great son of earth ever
interpreted it otherwise. From the days when Socrates scattered "the
sophist clan" in Athens, and forced men by the irresistible majesty of
his own moral elevation to believe in a morality which was more than a
string of rules sanctioned by convention; from the hour when he refused
to escape from prison because his conscience bade him submit to
die;--from the days of the sublime martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus, the
noble school of the Stoics, down to the philosophic Titans of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany, with the glorious sage
of Koenigsberg at their head, there has been but one answer to the
question, What is conscience? Conscience, they proclaimed, is the
voice of God. So surely as the maternal instinct in woman is the voice
of universal Nature, so surely is conscience the witness in us that we
are indeed "sons of God". If that teaching of the "Over-soul" be the
truth, then since the Divine is incarnate in every man, by what other
voice _can_ we be guided than by the Divine utterance commanding us to
live by a moral law? We are Divine by nature, by what other law of
life should we live?

Or, how are we to explain the appearance of so strange a visitant in a
universe which is dominated by the "struggle for existence"? The
intellectual difficulty of atheism is so insuperable that we hear of it
no more from men of science. I think Mr. Spencer's speculations have
given it the _coup de grace_. But difficult as is the question of the
origin of the cosmos, far more so is that of conscience. On what
principles are we to explain how a world, evolving itself mechanically,
cycle after cycle, has eventually produced an element so utterly at
variance with itself, an element which puts right before might,
self-surrender before the struggle for existence, and the law of pity
in place of the survival of the fittest? Is conscience a development
of the cosmic process? And, if so, how is such a _volta face_ in
nature explicable on purely mechanical grounds, even if the process
itself were so explicable? And how striking a fact that the last words
Mr. Huxley[2] spoke in public should have been devoted to prove that so
opposed were the cosmic and ethical processes--in other words, so
completely at variance are the law of conscience