56 Sermon Illustrations on Conscience

I remember when a boy my mother had a beautiful vase. I was charged not to touch it. My fingers, however, boy-like, itched to touch it. I frequently went around it, and peered behind it. I wondered if there might not be some painting on the bottom of it, as there was on the sides. In lifting ii up, one day, when I had grown bolder, it fell to the hearthstone and broke into a thousand pieces. I knew I had wounded the mother heart in that moment. She heard the crash and came in. I knew that I deserved punishment. But she only said, “My dear boy; do you see what you have done.” It was burned into my memory then what it cost to disobey law, and in all the sixty years that have elapsed since then, when I have looked upon the treasures of others, I have heard her voice saying to me, “Do you see what you have done?”

— Bishop D. A. GOODSELL

The following is told of Mr. Frank Crossley, a great promoter and founder of London missionary work:

Mr. Crossley was conscience incarnate. While yet a poor apprentice he had got free admission to a theater through the connivance of a fellow workman who kept the door; but when, as a renewed man, conscience demanded reparation for this sort of robbery, he reckoned up the entrance fee he had evaded, and sent the theater company sixty pounds.--PIERSON, “The Miracles of Missions.”

Is there any difference between the vibrations of sound on the tympanum of the ear and those on the surface of the water? Science does not seem to see a great difference, but Ruskin finds, in the differing effects, an illustration of the mystery of consciousness:

It is quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates, too; but the ditch hears nothing for all that; and my hearing is still to me as blest a mystery as ever, and the interval between the ditch and me, quite as great. If the trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell which begun my happiness, and is now of the passing bell which ends it, the difference between those two sounds to me can not be counted by the number of concussions. There have been some curious speculations lately as to the conveyance of mental consciousness by “brain-waves.” What does it matter how it is conveyed? The consciousness itself is not a wave. It may be accompanied here or there by any quantity of quivers and shakes, up or down, of anything you can find in the universe that is shakeable--what is that to me? My friend is dead, and my--according to modern views--vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or less mysterious, to me, than my old quiet one.