examiner is hardly able to take a turn in the recesses of his own heart without meeting one or more of the deputies of this indefatigable police magistrate. Wherever there is moral danger, a watchman is posted. Sin may advance through its subtlest approaches, but the watchful monitor is, nevertheless, ready to give warning. The stormiest gusts of passion or of lust are preceded by their own special cautions. Nor are these inward guardians lax in the discharge of their duties. It requires a long course of maltreatment to drive them from their posts. The experience of each one of us will testify to this. We can all look back to the time when we entered upon any particular course of sin to whose influence we may have ultimately succumbed. We recollect how vehement were the remonstrances of conscience, and how those remonstrances continued to be uttered in tones the most piercing until the watchman was either expelled or our ears became so hardened as to be unable to perceive his cries.

§ 3. b1. From conscience as to others.

The police jurisdiction exercised by us over the conduct and motives of others, affords the same presumption as that exercised over ourselves. St. Paul incidentally draws an argument for the existence of conscience from this very quality. "Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself." In other words, the faculty of judgment as to others implies a correspondent supreme governing power. Must not the Chief Magistrate, who constitutes and directs all this mechanism, be Himself necessarily a judge?

§ 4. c1. From conscience as to abstract right and wrong. So it is with the opinions we are constantly forming as to right and wrong. No man would take up a digest of decisions without saying, as he opened it, and, as he observed proposition after proposition laid down as the principles of determinations in the past and the precedents for adjudications in the future, without recognizing the existence of a law-promulging authority in the same way that the decisions themselves prove the existence of one that is law-applying.

b. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AS AN UNCONDITIONED EXECUTIVE, PUNISHING THE VIOLATORS OF HIS LAW, INFERRED FROM THE QUALITIES OF CONSCIENCE.

a1. From its action.

a2. Incessant.

b2. Unconditioned by time.

c2. Unconditioned by matter.

§ 5. a2. Conscience is incessant in its action.

We may be only conscious of that action at particular moments, but, whenever the curtain which covers it is lifted, we see its machinery, as we see that of a steamer when the engine door is unclosed, moving with an activity none the less incessant, from the fact that it had been unobserved. The agencies by which this spectacle is uncovered, and proof thus given of the incessant activity of conscience, will be examined under a subsequent head. It is sufficient here to advert to the effect of discovery of guilt by others as recalling the consciousness of remorse in its pristine vigor in the criminal himself, as well as to the similar effect

produced by coming suddenly upon the spot where a crime was committed, or by having any of the implements or incidents of that crime recalled. Conscience, observed or unobserved, proceeds unceasingly in its task of pronouncing and registering a decree of approval or condemnation on each particular act. This process of registry is in nowise affected by its escaping our notice.

It is here that we find one of the chief retributive elements of conscience. It places the soul under recognizances to keep the peace; and, on each violation, judgment is entered for a specific penalty. We may not be conscious of this, but the judgment is, nevertheless, entered, and proceeds to accumulate interest until the period of execution arrives.

§ 6. That this process of judgment goes on even in reference to acts of mere carelessness, (and a fortiori to acts of positive guilt,) a slight observation will show. A locktender omits to fasten at night the gates of the lock. The next morning he finds that through an additional and unexpected force of water, the gate has been burst open, and the boats lying in the basin injured. A switch-tender on a railway, in like manner, neglects his duty, and still more serious consequences ensue. A servant forgets to lock a hall-door, and that very night thieves find their way in. Now in each of these cases the offender may be entirely unconscious at the time of the wrongfulness of the negligence. The fact of conscience condemning it entirely escapes him. But it is otherwise when the evil result follows. This lifts the covering off the registry, and shows him that the act received its specific judgment. Its moral condemnation was the result

of its own inherent culpability, not of its consequences. was the consequences that unfolded the condemnation. They did not create it.

§ 7. b2. From conscience as unconditioned by time.

What I propose now to show is, that time has no effect in abating even the retrospective powers of conscience, but that the sentence of condemnation, recorded on us by ourselves, although frequently lost sight of, continues in full. vigor, ready, whenever our attention to it is renewed, to be recalled in sometimes increased distinctness. We turn suddenly upon the spot where a crime was committed, and the judgment of conscience, condemning that crime, is revived in its early terror. The inanimate creation, in fact, bears an important part in furnishing the attesting witnesses to each decree of condemnation. In one of the most splendid rhetorical passages that literature affords, St. Paul depicts all creation waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, and, like some huge, and yet exquisitely and most sensitively constructed animal, straining itself on tip-toe, so as to catch the first rays of that glory which is to release it from its own bondage :

"THE EARNEST EXPECTATION OF THE CREATURE WAITETH FOR THE MANIFESTATION OF THE SONS OF GOD. FOR THE CREATURE WAS MADE SUBJECT TO VANITY, NOT WILLINGLY, BUT BY REASON OF HIM WHO HATH SUBJECTED THE SAME IN HOPE."

And, as creation will respond to and be united in the future deliverance, so it bears witness to the present penalties for guilt. It may be years since we visited the spot of a former crime, and that crime may have been long since ap

parently forgotten, but the scenery will at once reopen the old remorse. Nor is the witnessing of nature purely mechanical. It is not necessary to do more than refer to Mr. Babbage's theory of a future state, by which he makes one of the chief agencies in the misery of the lost, in that awful condition, to be the constant presence of an atmosphere which combines, in an acute and eternal pressure, every idle word spoken during this life of probation. For, as he shows us, the palpitation of the air, produced by the slightest of sounds, though it may be, in the dullness of our present senses, apparently lost, yet continues to swell and expand in continually increasing circles, until that momentous period when, by the infinitely sensitive perceptions, even infinitely attenuated utterances are appreciable.

§ 8. But these witnesses speak for the present as well as for the future. A very remarkable homicide trial, in one of our Southwestern States, may illustrate my meaning in this respect. A young man was riding a blooded mare, on his way to a distant county, where he hoped to establish himself and his newly-married wife. He was waylaid, and assassinated on the road, and his body so buried under a pile of leaves that no traces of its sepulture were visible. It so happened that suspicion was turned to the real assassin, from the fact that he was found in possession of the mare the deceased had ridden. The arrest was made, and the accused, under charge of the sheriff, was carried to prison over the very road near which the homicide was committed. they reached the spot, the mare, which was ridden by one of the officers, began to display unmistakable evidences of terror, which increased or diminished as she approached or

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