Many people seem to possess an innate capacity to know right from wrong. Entirely apart from the promptings of education, custom, or reason, there is within them a feeling, a sometimes powerful force, tending to keep them in the paths of unselfish and loving action. How much the world owes this inward knowledge, or conscience, for unnumbered instances of wrong refrained from or redressed or of good done in season!
But the merely human sense of conscience is not always strong enough to prevent wrong impulses from gaining control. Men often find themselves in the position described by the Apostle Paul, "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Rom. 7:19). Faced by a similar quandary, thoughtful men today long for some potent rationale to bolster their best intentions.
Fears of temporal punishment under systems of law, of social ostracism, of physiological effects, or of the future hells of orthodox theologies sometimes appear to add weight to the right scale. But negative fears give shaky support to the goad of conscience.
