A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE.

BY THE

REV. CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, M.A.

"Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly: gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the breasts: let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out of her closet. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare Thy people, O Lord, and give not Thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them : wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God?"JOEL ii. 15-17.

THE trumpet that is blown in Zion rallies the entire people to a public and national act. And the ground of its demand for such an act is that the shame that has brought that conviction is itself public and national. It is the visible disgrace of the Lord's heritage in the eyes of the heathen world. Something is wrong with it as a whole. It stands there, in the face of day, convicted of failure, suffering under inevitable reproach. No one can mistake the signs of decay, of spiritual impotence. The heathen spectators, watching round, taunt it, as a thing that is obviously broken, deserted, condemned. "Where is now their God," they ask, "of Whom they made so much?"

A public dereliction! That is the fact before them. And that implies, at once, a public sin, which has brought the shame about. What is it? Not enough to search this or that individual conscience; not

enough to detect this or that personal lapse. Nay! the sin is the nation's own, in its integral character. It must discover, confess, bewail it, in its broad unity, through its official representatives, under its traditional and constitutional forms. "Blow the trumpet!" Startle these people at their business, in their pleasures, in the privacy of their homes, amid all their multitudinous occupations. Tell them that something more goes forward now than their own personal affairs. Wake! Rouse! Alarm! Make them lift their heads, as they toil in the shop, as they chaffer in the market, as they sit round the hearth, as they dispute in the schools. "Blow the trumpet

in Zion!" Bid them swarm from their houses. Everything private must cease. It is the nation that takes precedence. "Call a solemn assembly: gather the people, sanctify the congregation." And because it is a public act, therefore let the elders, the corporate officers, take their appointed places. Let the priests, with whom is lodged the responsibility of national speech, play their due part, at the set spot between porch and altar. Let them cry, on behalf of all, Spare us, good Lord, spare us! Spare Thy people! Give not Thine heritage to reproach!"

A national act! It is paramount over all individual accidents of interest or happiness. Is this man joyful? Is that man busy? Let all this yield and cease. The shadow of the people's penitence falls across the sunlight of man's days, and wipes out all the varied distinction of their many-coloured doings. No private claim can stand in face of the larger, deeper demand. Not even the blessed love of man or maiden newly wed. That might be suffered by kindly Jewish law to excuse a soldier from his service in the field. But now it may not justify its joy. No answer can be tolerated which ventures to plead, “I have married a wife, therefore I cannot come." No!

it must postpone its delight. "Let the bridegroom come forth from his chamber, and the bride out of her closet;" "And let them weep between the porch and the altar." Nor is it a matter of the degree of personal responsibility or personal guilt. No one need turn. to ask, "How far was I aware of the nation's sin? In what measure did I partake? Nay! the most innocent fall under the ban. The very children, whose light hearts acquit them of all knowledge of what the sin may be the very infants who have never yet left the warm white peace of a mother's bosom― even these are drawn within the range of this black sorrow; they are sharers, through their flesh and blood, with the deeds that have been done. For the nation constitutes one organic thing: it moves along the lines of its fate, as an integral mass, governed by a single momentum, and all are swept along in the The action is collective, is corporate, is organic. It cannot be sorted out, in retail portions of separate responsibility, to this one or to that. All are one, and all are implicated. Gather them all! Gather the children. "Gather the very babes that suck the breasts!" That is the imperious, shattering cry of the trumpet which is to be blown in Zion! Its voice is irresistible. It penetrates every nook and corner. It suffers nothing to escape or be excused. It can permit but one passion to be felt-the passion of a pleading penitence. It can allow but one word to be heard in all the holy city. "Spare Thy people, O Lord, and let not Thy heritage be put to reproach. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now thy God?"

current.

So positive, so unhesitating, is the Bible in asserting the national and collective character of conscience. It conceives an entire nation engaged in public and concerted repentance for a public and collective wrong. And our Prayer-book, by giving us this

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SALIFORNIA

passage as the keynote of Christian Lent, endorses and emphasizes the reality of the conception.

Yet, somehow, we are always being told, we half persuade ourselves, that a conscience can only be individual; that the sense of spiritual obligation to God, such as is obviously involved in an act of penitence, can only be a private and personal concern of the individual soul; that it is absurd to demand of a corporate body, or of a nation, a sense of moral responsibility or a consciousness of guilt.

Now, I would challenge this statement, that conscience is an individual concern, at the very outset, by asking whether the exact opposite be not nearer the truth. Could a conscience exist at all, if it were merely individual? Can the mere individual man account for his having a conscience? If he were quite alone, and had no necessary relationship to any other being, would the language of conscience, of moral obligation, have any meaning? We talk of a man's duty to himself; but we are aware, as we do so, that we are using a metaphor. Duty, obligation, these are binding terms; they imply that the man is under a moral compulsion; he owns allegiance to a Power that he did not create, and cannot disown. Something outside and beyond him is involved. His life is assumed to have wider horizons than belong to it in its purely self-regarding, self-contained character. Whenever a man solemnly assures us that he is bound by his conscience to do whatever he likes best, or to seek his own highest interest, he is greeted by us with the smile that he deserves. And the ethical systems that start with the individual as such, complete in himself, necessarily set themselves to explain away conscience, as a deposit of past habits; as a shorthand sign for forgotten experiences; as a mechanical result of accumulated racial experiments; as anything but what it is.

No! conscience cannot exist without witnessing to some relationship in which the soul stands to something beyond it. What is this something? It cannot be anything unconscious, material, mechanical. No one ever felt himself bound by his conscience to conform to the law of gravitation. It is a moral. relationship that is implied, and morality exists only for persons. The obligation which conscience asserts can only be an obligation of a person to a person. That is why, if once we become satisfied that such a thing as conscience exists, we have by that very fact arrived at a necessary proof for the existence of God; since the very terms which we use to express moral obligation are only intelligible in relation to a Personality in which we adhere, and to which we are bound. Far, then, from conscience being individual in its character, it is dual, it is social, in its very essence. It requires two persons, at least-God and man-in relation to one another, to create a conscience at all.

But more conscience cannot be confined to an act of the soul alone with its God. For, in making its judgment, in becoming aware of its obligation, it is forced to conceive of itself as typical, as representative of all men. Any act that claims to be conscientious, denies, by that claim, that it is peculiar to any one individual. It must mean that it is such an act as every one would own to be equally obligatory under identical conditions. It must be an act that witnesses to a law which is independent of private and personal varieties. The moral necessity must be recognizable by all as carrying its proper and unalterable authority with it. The particular conditions under which it occurs may be wholly unique; it may be impossible for them to reoccur. Yet still we must mean that any man in the world, if he had ever found himself in that situation, must have done