A Living Conscience Is Wealth

Though I forget much, I shall never forget the counsel of a virtuous teacher — the teacher of the morals lesson — which she used to repeat to us at the close of her lesson, while we were still at our school desks, just beginning to grasp the meaning of life.

She asked each of us to set aside five minutes of her time when she took to her bed just before sleep, for a purely mental exercise, in which she would question herself about every deed she had done in her day and every impulse that had occurred to her in it — recalling what had contented and gladdened her, and what had disturbed and angered her by its happening. She would thus pass the day's deeds again through her imagination, then reflect a little on the result of this reckoning, repenting of the slips and sins she had committed — cunning, lying, hypocrisy, and so on — and resolving, of course, to avoid them on the morrow, just as she would inwardly rejoice over the good deeds and intend to repeat them then.

That is a very easy exercise, yet not without importance, for it helps to straighten the soul, even to develop the mind, and to nourish the seeds of virtue by that direct communion with the living conscience during this reckoning — which, by dint of repetition, becomes a kind of examination not of the conscience alone but of the whole personality.

What, then, is conscience? Is it not that hidden divine voice dwelling within our souls? Is it not the intermediary between us and the Creator, which makes us feel content at every good deed we do, and which reproaches us for every sin we commit?

A living conscience is a great fortune for man: if he invests it well he becomes, in very truth, among the best of men in character, deed, and thought; and if he neglects it and remains ignorant of its nature, he sinks into the ranks of the corrupters — and of the criminals too.

Yet the examination of conscience cannot be carried out, nor its hoped-for benefit obtained, except by one whose inner soul is sound and who is by nature fashioned to love the good and love others — not by one molded in selfishness, inclined to corruptions and vile things, wicked, with a dead conscience. They say the criminal suffers whenever his inner soul takes him to task for his sin — that is, at the beginning of his career in crime, while his conscience is still awake; but if he persists in his course, he must come at last to a day when his inner soul will no longer take him to task for sin, and he will feel no pain at all; for he stifled the voice of his conscience the first time, and likewise the times that followed, until he came to have a silent conscience — like one who has no conscience at all.

And there is no doubt that if we persevered in the practice of examining the conscience for some length of time — not to say for a lifetime — we would mend many of our faults (and who is without fault?), and we would straighten many crookednesses rooted deep in us. How many abnormalities do we see which we have grown used to accepting on the plea of civilization — some of whose aspects we have disfigured and clothed in the garb of silliness and shoddiness... And how much crime without punishment do we see, to which we have grown so accustomed that it has come to seem to us a natural thing, so that we try to hide it from our eyes though we see it plainly...

It is told of the late Ahmad Hassanein Pasha — who was one of the eminent men of the Arab nation, and a model of manhood — that when he went out to explore the desert he took with him the book of “Thoughts” by the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. He says, God rest him, that the book helped to keep despair from him and saved him from suicide, by the steadiness of nerve that is in it, the storming of obstacles and the standing fast before them, and the summons to patience. Among the memorable things told of this book: “On the evening of the day of a great battle, Marcus Aurelius passed a night thinking over his day, analyzing himself, and criticizing the errors he had committed and the just deeds he had performed in it.” — “And I,” says Ahmad Hassanein, “without being either an emperor or a philosopher, go back every night, before I take to my bed, over what has passed in my day, analyzing the moral errors I have committed — and the political errors as well.”

Would that we all trained ourselves to examine our consciences: our women and our men, our statesmen and our writers, our merchants and our officials, our doctors and our journalists, our students and our teachers! If we did what I hope for, our affairs would go straight, and we would walk in the road of right guidance which the sound nations walked before us; and we would be able to lift our heads with easy conscience, smiling of mouth and bright of brow. And just as a man's worth lies in the soundness of his mind and the purity of his heart, so a nation's pride lies in its perfection, which stands firm only by the uprightness of its individuals' morals and the honor of their deeds.

Nations are but morals, so long as these remain;
if their morals pass away, they too pass away.