March 15
Daily Cheer for All the YearBlessed is he whose conscience hath not condemned him, and who is not fallen from his hope in the Lord.—ECCL. xiv, 2.
This, above all, to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
SHAKESPEARE.
Not all the glory, all the praise,
That decks the prosperous hero's days,
The shout of men, the laurel crown,
The pealing echoes of renown,
May conscience's dreadful sentence drown.
MRS. HOLFORD.
To disobey conscience is to commit the last disloyalty. It is to learn to be untrue to yourselves. All sins may be condoned but that. If you are untrue to yourselves, you must reap terrible consequences. Conscience will make mistakes if you have been careless about educating it; but, mistake or no mistake, its commands are peremptory, and it must be obeyed. . . . Illuminate conscience, reinforce conscience, educate conscience as well as you can, but recollect that in the last resort it is a peremptory judge, that it is better to obey it, mistaken even if it be in some degree, than to disobey it and run the risk of thereby passing over a judgment, the nearest representative for us of the judgment of God. You may say to me, when I urge you to this exact and earnest obedience, that I am actually asking you to precipitate yourselves, at any rate sometimes, into the gulf of sheer loss. . . . Duty done is never sheer loss. Self-interest demands something else, but, believe me, you and I live in a world of eternity, and the passing conditions of a passing time are no measurement of the final effects of that which is done by a being that shall live for ever.
W. J. KNOX-LITTLE.