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Evening Star, Issue 19020, 15 August 1925, Page 2

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Mr and Mrs Evelyn Hcseltino, of the Goldings, Great Warley, Essex, celebrated their golden wedding lately. Rj thanking parishioners for gifts, Mr Hcseltino, formerly master of the Essex Union Hunt, said tho only time thov had been tempted to leave Warier was when ho was asked to buy a, "great estate and was told he could bo made a lord for £30,000. It did not appeal to him and he declined the proposal.

FROM A SUBURBAN BALCONY We have all been talking skips this week. My balcony is so situated that I can see them coming and going up and down the bay. I have thus watched the contingent of the American fleet that honors us with its presence. Newspapers have discussed the visit of our American cousins from almost every standpoint. Perhaps there is still one left for mo. No subjects lend themselves so well to symbolical treatment as the ship and the sea. In all ages analogies have been found between them and the voyaging of man over the sea of life. And that is right and proper. For, as Emerson reminds us, “ nothing is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost it is wholly new for an ulterior purpose. Air, for instance, is for breathing, but it can be formed into words that are the rovealers of souls.” So of ships. # * # • Many years ago ‘ Punch ’ had a celebrated cartoon entitled ‘ Dropping the Pilot.’ It represented the ex-Kaiser dismissing Bismarck from the ship of State. Most of us who have sailed by sea know what that means. It was the pilot’s business to guide the ship out to sea. There his duty ends. He hands over the responsibility now to the captain, climbs down the ladder to the waiting tug, the order is given full speed ahead, and Back flies the foam, the hoisted flag streams back; The long smoke wavers on the homeward track; Back fly with winds tilings which the winds obey, The good ship follows her appointed way. And in the voyage of lifo there comes a day like that to us all. There comes the day when each of us drops the pilot. We are freed at last from tutors and governors, and become ourselves the captains of our souls. And these tutors and governors, how shall wo name them? There is first the homo, with its father and mother and sister and brother and nurses and servants, and all the hundred and one influences that have conspired to give it distinction in the memory. Then there is the school, with its teachers and comrades. What a day it is when wo come home from school, throw down satchel and books, and say “ Th 2,1.1k goodness I have done with them.” Personally, I had great sympathy with the boy who, on getting to the hilltop overlooking the school, saw tbo latter on fire. Watching it for a minute, he said; “ I’m glad the blamed old thing is burnt, I hadn’t my jography. lesson, anyway.” Anyhow, there comes tho day when the school is practically burnt for ns all. Wo get away from homo and school, from father’s authority and mother’s apron strings, and from teachers’ terrors or commands. We have dismissed the pilots, and set out on the voyage of life ourselves. * * * » And now tho great issue is who or what is on the bridge? There must be some supreme authority, if there is not to be chaos on the ship and disaster on tho voyage. One can conceive of three possible competitors for the post—Passion, Reason, Conscience. The problem of life is to determine which of these is to be given supreme control. The struggle to determine this lies at the back of ail lifo and literature.' One may say straight away that it is the last only who has tho right to the position, is fitted for it, is in a sense divinely ordained to it. Some may doubt that, and ask : Why should it get supremacy over the others? What business has any faculty of the nature to dominate the rest? That is a metaphysical or philosophical issue upon which I do not care to enter. For all practical purposes it is enough to say that for everything that takes place on the vov age of lifo the final court of appeal must be: Is it right? Ought I to do it? And conscience is the judge of that. Tho senses supply the raw material of thought. Reason selects, sorts out, analyses, and combines them, and says this is true; that is false. Conscience takes the true, lavs it on the will, and orders it to he done. Conscience is thus the supremo commander of life. The safety and power of lifo depend on giving it that primacy. Tho failure to do it, the contests between it and passion and rea,son for the position, create the great tragedies of history and literature. Nearly all Shakespeare’s dramas are concerned with it. It is the motif of Tennyson’s ‘ Vision of Sin,’ ‘ Palace of Art,’ ‘ Idylls of the King.’ It is tho stock-in-trade of all novelists who take their art seriously. It is the theme in especial of George Eliot’s greatest works, ‘ Tho Mill on ■‘■he Floss,’ ‘ Tito Milema,’ 1 Adam Bede,’ and ‘ The Spanish Gypsy.’ To every issue that comes up for judgment on tiie voyago of life we must put the question: Is it right? not Is it pleasant, or profitable, or prudent, or customary, or rational, or even is it wise? For, as Ruskin says; “If you resolve to do right you will soon do wisely; but if you resolve to do wisely only you will never do right.” a « a a But what about conscience itself? Is it to be trusted? Is it infallible? No, it is not. It may not give mo the absolute truth, but it will give tho truth for me. If a thing appears to me to be wrong, though not really so in itself, it is wrong for me. The groat Apostle, in his defence before Agrippa, says: “I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day ” i.e., he claimed to have been obeying his sense of right, his conscience, as sincerely when ho was a believer in Jewish errors and a persecutor as when lie was a Christian. So I may bo tempted to do things right in themselves and that others may do without acting wrongly. But if they seem not right to me, and if I do them, I am putting out the light that is within me; I am dishonoring ruy conscience. All this, of course, implies that there are different standards of right and wrong. What is right to me may not be right to you, mid vice versa; and also what is wrong to me to-day may not be wrong to me in later years. Is there, then, no infallible standard to which we can appeal? The captain on the bridge, when in doubts about his course, is not left alone. Ho can consult his officers. Ho has the steadfast stars and sun. He has also a chart, which has been prepared with infinite care and cost, in which tho course is marked out, tho danger spots clearly indicated, the sale direction definite and precise. The captain may imagine that this or the other way or act is the best or prudent one, hut he is not justified in acting on his own feelings or judgment till he has conferred with his officers and checked them by the official chart. Is there

I any such chart or standard by which Iwe can adjust the conscience P There is the experience of the race. There is j a vast body of evidence, tho slow accuj mulation of generations of mankind, giving us more or less definite guidance ,as to how conscience should act. The I evidence is both negative and positive, ; indicating tho wrong as well as the j right, the bad as well as the good. But lit is difficult to bring the individual 1 case under the particular principle rela- ! tive to it. The elements of food are diffused through the air and the earth, but they need to be gathered up, i focused in bread, before they can be ; utilised practically. Is there any such fusion of the elements of absolute right j and wrong to which conscience may be j brought, checked, and adjusted? Those who accept the Christian faith believe that such is found in Him who is the . centre of it. But here again wo aro : met with the puzzle that those who profess to accept Him as the standard of conscience endlessly differ in their conception of what He teaches to bo right or wrong. * » * * May not the error here arise from confounding intellectual belief with tho dictates of conscience? In his ‘History of England ’ Froude refers to the Catholic persecutions. He says there is no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution except just this; “That as we aro now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws, so amongst those who believed them to be just there were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human feelings to be lenient in tho execution of those laws, while others of a harder nature and narrower sympathies enforced them without reluctance and even with exultation. The heart, when it is rightly constituted, corrects the folly of the head, and thus, and thus only, are we justified in censuring those whoso names figure largely in the persecuting lists and he goes on to say this defence is impregnable to logic. Probably it is. But the practical point that emerges out of this quotation from Froude is that wo can drug conscience to make it subservient to intellectual theories. In Poter Bayne’s drama, ‘The Last Days of Jezebel,’ h® pictures the elders of Israel discussing the orders of Ahab and his imperious queen to kill Naboth. One of them boggles at the murder, hesitates to vote for it, sees the right and the just, but sees also with greater clearness the loss of the favor of royalty; indulges in a casuistically framed argument to try to make believe that killing is no murder. Another replies, without any scruples: I take _my conscience by the throat When it rebels and choke it. For tho time It lies as dead, but when its day arrives It can perform its_ office healthfully. Your conscience is so drunken and bemused, So drugged with plausibilities and lies, That it has ceased to know the right from the wrong. It is this drugging of conscience that makes the pathos and the tragedies of life. Wo find conscience at all stages of vitality. Scripture speaks of a pur®, conscience, a good conscience, but also of a weak conscience, a scared conscience, a dead conscience. To these might be added, though they are rather 1 variations of the foregoing than distinct species, the restless conscience, the morbid conscience, tho coward conscience, the killed conscience, and the responsive conscience. * # # « For if conscience can bo killed it can also bo cured, enlightened, made sensitive to truth and right, as the needle to the Polo. Is not this the secret of tho world’s unrest to-day? Is it not duo to tho conscience of men taking the truth that reason is discovering and prodding them to turn it into duty; for every truth implies a corresponding duty, just as every duty must be rooted in a truth? How many things under which the conscience once sat quite comfortably would madden it to-day 1 Take, e.g., the slave trade. Few know, or at any rate realise, that England was once the great slave trader of the world. There is no grimmer or bloodier page in her history than tho transportation of negroes from Africa to America. Lecky says that among the few provisions of tho Treaty of Utrecht which gave unqualified and unanimous satisfaction was tho Assicnto contract, which gave Britain the primacy among slave traders. But within a generation a change was becoming apparent. But it took two before the impact of an enlightened conscience began to toll on public opinion. It is little more than a century ago sine® even the church washed its hands of the traffic. But today the idea of one man owning others and using them as chattels would be intolerable in any British dominion. Thus we can see how conscience has grown in one instance, and we may hope that it will continue to be enlarged and enlightened in regard to other evils to which it is still tolerant or insensitive. Animals have been found in caves that seem to have lost their power of vision. But Darwin tells of rats found in such caves that, when they were gradually brought from the darkness into more light and then fuller light, the eyesight slowly came back again. The great thing is to keep in the light, to bo responsive to the truth and duty that we fuel to be right. And so conscience will become more and more sensitive. I read the other day a curious story about a menagerie that had been sold. The straw that bad been used by the wild boasts was bought by a livery stable-keeper. When ! ho put the straw in which a lion had 1 couched into the horses’ stalls tho I horses were uneasy and restless and would, not go into tho stalls, though they had never seen a lion in their lives. It was an instinctive dread of : tho enemy. And the comment of Arch- j bishop Lees, of Melbourne, who tells i the story, is apt and in order. He ' says it is possible for a conscience to j be so responsive to the true and good that “ when even a thing you do not j know to bo a sin, an enemy you have I not even come in sight of shall draw ! near, there shall be the scent of it, i the disturbance, the arousing call of it j that alarms and delivers you even ! while the enemy is putting the trap 1 across tho road in front of you.” Ono at least of our race attained to that; ideal, and He promised to make it possible for all. Through defects and tragedies the race yet moves slowly towards the possibility. Tho drama of life is tho drama of the conscience. ‘ Ron. |