01.12. The Death of Conscience
Chapter 12 THE DEATH OF CONSCIENCE.
Conscience is that power or faculty of the soul, by which we recognize and pronounce upon the moral character of our words and deeds. This attribute lifts us above the animal world more remarkably than our immortality; for if conscience should be disposed of or destroyed in some way in a human being, then he has become an immortal instead of a mortal brute.
It is not to be denied that as a race we possess as purely a physical or animal nature, as the inhabitants of our barns, stables and farms, We eat, sleep and try to protect ourselves from the weather as they do. The scramble for food we see in some places, the noisy mastication and hurried gulping and swallowing by a long line of bowed heads is marvellously suggestive of scenes we have beheld in troughs and different kind of receptacles located in styes and pens. We are certainly animal, no matter what else may be said of us. The moral nature with its voice the conscience, lifts us unspeakably above the brute world to which we are so closely allied in similarity of fleshly form and appetite, and reaches forth its hand and exercises its energies to touch and get in harmony with a spiritual life and the spiritual Universe above it. Its voice calling to duty, disapproving wrong, and condemning sin within, shows there is a spirit and nature within us, distinct from the body and utterly unknown to the animal world about us. No domestic or wild animal has any conception or knowledge of right or wrong in the moral sense. They know of no such things as irreverence or Sabbath-breaking; while stealing, idolatry, false witnessing, and all other sins, are utterly beyond their comprehension. This peculiar knowledge belongs to men and angels, necessitating a Day of Judgment for them because of this higher form of life, with its perception of good and evil, its volitions, its freedom of choice, its power to obey or disobey divine commandments, and its deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for conduct, and accountability to the Almighty Maker of Heaven and earth. The difficulty of the higher nature on the inside with the lower nature on the outside can well be imagined and also remembered. If the visible material being without is a hog or dog or goat, the angel within is bound to have a hard time in making itself heard and in endeavoring to secure its rights. It is a long, bitter struggle indeed to persuade the spirit which the Creator put inside to yield to the domineering life of an animal on the outside; to accept the fleshy enswathement of muscle, bone and blood as the soul’s true dress, and the domain of appetite to be the realm of a nature made in the image of God; to let the body monopolize and absorb, and pull down, until the man is dog from head to foot, hog up and down, or goat through and through.
If human beings only possessed the animal nature, then they could live like such creatures and not have a pang of shame, regret or remorse. It is the moral nature that gives such trouble for awhile to men who would ignore the existence and presence of the soul, and strive to live as if they had only a body, with simply a superior intellect to animals at the other end of it. But the teaching of the Bible is that by a certain course of conduct, the conscience can be lulled to rest, put to sleep, seared as with a hot iron, choked into insensibility and completely slain or murdered so far as this present terrestrial life is concerned.
What the Scripture declares about this fearful consummation of the death of conscience is plainly revealed all around us in the lives of men. In both volumes, the sacred and human records of the fearful catastrophe, it is observable that it was not accomplished at once. But nevertheless it will finally done.
There is a frightful awakening of conscience in Hell, As we see in the case of the "Rich Man" and evidenced by the torment of the lost. The undying worm and unquenchable flame spoken of by Christ as the suffering of beings in the Pit is a figure of the revived conscience, eating at the heart, and burning its agony in the soul forever. It is there awake and alive for all eternity. But while this is the awful truth about the future of conscience in the Lost World, yet equally true is it that it can be utterly dead for months and years in the present existence, and preceding the dissolution of soul and body. In the remarkable spectacle of Joseph’s brethren quietly eating after having thrust their brother into a pit where they had left him to die a lingering death by starvation, we behold such a case of moral callousness and hardness as almost to challenge belief and cause one to doubt the evidence of his own senses. Here they were breaking bread while a brother who had just begged piteously for mercy, was nearby doomed to a horrible death by their own counsel and hands. It looked like the bread would have appeared stained with blood, and have choked them. And verily it would have done so to any but the spiritually petrified and devilized.
Another instance we see in the case of Judas who could quietly sit at the table, endure the eyes of Christ fixed upon him, receive a sop from his hands, eat it, and then go out and betray Him to His enemies for a handful of silver.
Still another exhibition of the dead conscience is beheld in the action of the Pharisees, Scribes and Elders in bringing about the mock trial, false witnessing and actual murder of the Son of God. And still another manifestation is held up in the Bible, in the case of the woman who had committed a gross crime, and then wiping her mouth asked, what evil have I done? The days of the Inquisition could furnish libraries in description of what occurred in that period in the name of Conscience, when the very moral faculty referred to and invoked was dead.
Men who could behold unmoved a fellow creature die slowly before their eyes on a Rack which cracked and broke his bones, and tore muscle and sinew out of place; who could pitilessly mark the thrusting of red hot irons into the bowels of men and hear with greedy ears their frightful screams; such beholders and listeners were no longer men, but through the utter death of conscience had become a horrible compound of animal and devil. The dead conscience is seen today not only in practiced political and financial villainy, but in willful persistent wrongdoing in the family and church, in habitual falsifying and slander, the steady breaking of the commandments of God, and all done without a single inward pang by day, or the loss of a moment’s sleep by night.
Such people can deny the words, the power and the Blood of Christ, and yet eat at the Lord’s Table. They can, like Joseph’s brethren, wound and stab a brother with their slanderous tongues, and then after that take up bread in their bloodstained hands and eat heartily. They can commit the grossest social crimes and then wipe their mouths and say, why what have I done? Myriads of church members break the Sabbath constantly not only without scruple, but without thought!
Doctors and patients regularly and systematically murder unborn offspring, then sit down to eat, and wiping their mouths say in reply to horrified questioners, why what evil have I done? And yet what a taste of blood all such bread ought to have in view of the Heaven denounced crime which they have committed.
Still the horror grows as we see great numbers of those who were once in the light and experiences of Christianity, now sitting far back in the church in the midst of sinners, with faces like stone, their souls animalized and devilized, while hearing unmoved the deepest, mightiest and most burning messages from God in the pulpit. They often smile and whisper during the delivery of just such divinely anointed sermons, and hardly get out of the church or tent, before they are deeply engrossed in conversation about dress, fashion, business or pleasure.
One might as well speak to a corpse, as preach to such a person, so far as spiritual sensibility of heart and life response is concerned. Indeed, God calls all gatherings of such individuals, "The Congregation of the Dead."
Some one was telling the writer years ago of a sermon he heard Sam Jones preach in the "eighties" on a camp ground located in a dense woodland in the State of Mississippi. He said it was a discourse on Sin, and in it, toward the conclusion, the preacher spoke of the death of conscience. As he proceeded in the heart sickening description, the camp fires slowly going down, the woods full of dark shadows, the silence so profound that the rustle of a falling leaf could be heard, the people became conscious of the faint chirping of a solitary cricket some little distance away in the neighboring depths of the forest. The lonely, pathetic note was a kind of symbolism of the voice of conscience, and as it at last sank into silence, that also was so like the portrayal going on of the gradual dying and final death of conscience, that a number of the observers of the incident were moved most profoundly.
If that was melancholy, what is it to see going on unmistakably before us, the weakening, and ultimately the stillness of an utter death come upon the voice of an immortal soul? There can be no comfort in the thought that some of these consciences will arouse agonizingly in a last moment as did Judas, or that all will arise in torment never to sleep again, as was the case of Dives in Hell, and that such will be the experience of all the nations and multitudes who go down into the Bottomless Abyss. There is no hope or remedy for the lost soul in Perdition.
Somehow we feel that the cry of conscience will be the sharper, and its agony all the greater when it awakens in Hell, after its long sleep and deathlike trance on earth.
Meantime godly parents, and devoted pastors and evangelists are trying to make themselves heard by their spiritually dead, families and congregations; and stretched on their faces in supplication are begging God to give them the word, the conversation, the prayer, the sermon, the cry! that will penetrate the dull, cold ear before them and bid the sleeper wake and make the dead arise.
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