2. The lamp burns with the light of conscience. Every human being has a conscience, yet few people know its nature ; just as everybody drinks water, but few people understand its chemical composition. In the case of the water we drink, fortunately we are refreshed just as fully with the peasant's ignorance as with the chemical knowledge of Michael Faraday. It is not so, however, with conscience. The more fully we understand its nature and laws — other things being equal — the better can we follow its guidance, and the nobler lives we may lead. So, in addition to the interest attaching to the subject as a fascinating problem in the science of mind, it has' also a great interest as a question bearing directly upon practical life. For conscience will not tell us in every case just what is the right thing to do. We have often seen equally conscientious people on opposite sides. The first and most important thing is that there should shine and burn in us an unquenchable conviction that there is a right, and that we ought under all circumstances to follow the dictates of our awakened moral sense. We have to believe that these dictates are from God — not the variable rules of mere expediency and opportunisna, but of Divine authority ; and as in the symbolism of the older Churches a sacred lamp was kept alight in the sanctuary, which it was held sacrilege to extinguish, so we must beware of putting out or darkening, by sophisms and self-deception, that candle of the Lord which He has lit in our spirits.
^ Being convinced that the inner light was universal, Fox had the courage to believe that heathen people were led of the Spirit of God. Thus in America, when a doctor denied that the Indians possessed any such light, Fox called an Indian, and asked " Whether or not, when he lied or did wrong to any one, there was not something in him that reproved him for it ? " The Indian said there was. Here Fox anticipated a view that has since been forced upon Christian thought by the comparative study of religions. He believed that God had not left Himself anywhere
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without witness, and he maintained this faith before the know- ledge of non-Christian religions brought it into prominence. He did not hesitate to call this inner light the inward Christ, even among the heathen who knew not Christ's name. For he assumed that the witness of God was one, and that this Spirit which re- proved the Indian was the Spirit which would bring him to Christ. This may still be considered assumption, but it is an assumption the Christian must make.^
^ It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance of light and higher instinct. But however much we may philosophize about sin or attempt to analyse its essence, there is some dark secret there, of which from time to time we are grievously conscious. Who does not know the sense of failure to overcome, of lapsing from a hope or a purpose, the burden of the thought of some cowardice or unkindness which we cannot undo and which we need not have committed ? No resolute determinism can ever avail us against the stern verdict of that inner tribunal of the soul, which decides, too, by some instinct that we cannot divine, to sting and torture us with the memory of deeds, the momentousness and importance of which we should utterly fail to explain to others. There are things in my own past which would be met with laughter and ridicule if I attempted to describe them, that still make me blush to recollect with a sense of guilt and shame, and seem indelibly branded upon the mind. There are things, too, of which I do not feel ashamed which, if I were to describe them to others, would be received with a sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed them. That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems so wholly independent of tradition or convention.^
II.
God Kindles the Lamp.
1. All nature tells us that God is light, and that He ever seeks for opportunities of manifesting that light which is so often imprisoned and only waiting to be released by the touch of man. We are constantly finding that there are great resources for light in this world of ours, more than we had ever imagined. Not even at night, when this hemisphere is in the shade and does not ^ H. G. Wood, George. Fox, 145. ^ A. C. Benson, The Silent Isle, 133.
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enjoy the light of the sun, does God leave it to darkness. Then the moon and stars shine forth : but beyond all that, then does man draw upon the resources of light which lie buried or hidden in nature till he learns how to call them forth. In the history of the ages there is no progress greater than in the discovery of the possibilities on the part of man of producing light. This age supplies exceptional illustrations of this. Man is finding, as he never did before, that nature has light-giving capacities wliich need only be touched to be brought forth; that God has filled even the material world with possibilities of grand outbursts of light. What would God have us learn from all this ? That there is more light in His universe than we had ever thought ; that He, true to His own nature, has placed in it capacities for outshining which are chained up for the present, but which He calls men to unloose, so that they may burst forth into light.