easier to defend an opinion than upon this of the universality of the Spirit's operations. If we were limited in our defence to the power and agency of conscience, we should have no fears of being driven from our position. We enter not-for it were beside our purpose-into the metaphysical question of the nature of conscience; and we attempt not to follow philosophical inquirers, when they would determine the materials of which its court is constructed. It is enough for us, that every man knows and feels what we mean by conscience; and that, whatever the account which may be advanced of its phenomena, you are all sensible to yourselves of the workings of the principle. There is something in every man which tells him of the rightness of virtue and the wrongness of vice; which spreads over the whole soul a feeling of satisfaction when he does what it directs, and causes remorse and uneasiness whenever there is the hardihood to thwart its decisions. And if you reflect a little, you will perceive, that, whether or no we be metaphy

sically right in identifying conscience with the Spirit of God, if you took away conscience, and introduced the striving agency of the Spirit, there would be practically the same circumstances in human condition; so that the man who has a conscience, a conscience which warns him emphatically back when he would overstep the boundary lines of virtue, and which applies the scourge of a stern reprobation whenever he has pushed on in spite of the admonition; a conscience, moreover, which urges to right doing, though a thousand obstacles lie in the way, and which never fails to distil the oil of gladness into the soul, if there have been a hearkening to its precepts; the man, we say, who has this conscience, is situated exactly as another would be, who, without a conscience, was striven with by the Spirit of God; and the argument is therefore sound for all theological purposes, which assumes conscience to be nothing less than an influence of the Holy Ghost. It is true, that, in the storm and mutiny of human passions, conscience may be partially overborne, and for

awhile, if not finally, deposed from its sovereignty. But this interferes not with the identification of conscience with the Holy Spirit: it rather shews the accuracy of that identification. We know that the Spirit may be resisted, and grieved, and finally expelled; so that all the phenomena, as they may be termed, of a seared and even overpowered conscience, a conscience which shall admonish more and more feebly in proportion as its warnings are more and more disregarded, but which nevertheless, in the midst of its apparent defeat, will sometimes rouse itself into such tremendousness of force, that the soul is convulsed and ground down by the visitation; all these phenomena, we say, may be satisfactorily accounted for on the supposition, that conscience is the Spirit of the living God, driven away at times, or quenched by obstinate wickedness, but ever and anon returning, and specially when the hardened transgressor nears the frontier of eternity, and attesting its divinity by walking as an avenger over the desecrated territory. And

And never, amid

without insisting further on the identity of conscience with the striving influences of the Spirit, we should wish each of you to examine the weight of moral accountableness which is laid on him by the possession of a conscience. We have nothing to do with his having weakened or crushed that conscience. He may have deadened its sensitiveness, or wearied it into silence; but he was born with a conscience, and he grew up with a conscience. all the varieties of mental endowment and corporeal vigour, unless, indeed, there be absolute idiotism, so that in nothing but form is man marked off from the brute, will you find the instance of a human being ushered on this theatre of existence, with no power of discriminating right from wrong, free to enter on a career of misdoing, and to follow it through a long life, unchecked by any high and bold remonstrance from within. We declare of conscience that it is the mirror in which is glassed the moral character of Deity: and though, with a daring and desperate hand, man

may dash in pieces this mirror, yet there lies something of practical impossibility against his breaking it into such atoms that all reflection of Godhead shall cease; and in and in every man's life there shall be moments, when from the scattered shivers the image of a sin-hating Deity is given with such vividness, that the transgressor will feel as though the veil of heaven had been suddenly rent, and there, upon his throne of adamant, he saw the Creator marshalling a ministry of vengeance, and preparing himself, in the might of his indignation, to deal tremendously with the proud, and the scornful, and the sensual. And the conscience which tells a man that God wills him to be virtuous and holy, can also tell him that it is his duty to seek help from God in his struggles against sin, and can encourage him with a good hope that he shall not seek in vain. Who is there of you that will dare to maintain, that at no time, and under no circumstances, hath he felt within himself mighty and unaccountable impulses, the stirrings and heavings as of a disturbed and disquieted