It is really what happens with the rifleman who gives way to the recoil and forms a habit of flinching, or with the cricketer who allows his desire to score to overcome his habit of caution. The old habit fades from disuse; the new habit grows strong from use. The rifleman becomes a hopelessly bad shot; the batsman degenerates into a slogger: the young man swears every time he speaks, and his conscience loses all power to check him. Take the case of the letter "h." The young Lochinvar who comes out of the West sounds his aitches properly and easily--just as properly and as easily as a fencer makes his parries, as a pianist strikes the right notes, as C. B. Fry plays a straight bat. It is a matter of teaching and of use, and has become a habit. From his earliest efforts at speech he has heard the "h" sounded, has been checked if he failed to sound it, has corrected himself if he made a slip. But the young Lochinvar who comes out of the East drops his aspirates all over the place without a blush or a pang. He has never been taught to sound the "h." He has not practised it. He has formed the habit of not sounding it, and it would take him years of painful effort to change the habit. Now what happens in the case of a letter "h" is what happens in the case of the rifle, of the ticing ball, of the swearing. One man's memory is educated to remind him not to swear, not to slog, not to flinch, not to drop the "h." The other man's memory is not so trained. And this trained memory we call conscience. It is purely habit: and it is wholly mechanical. There is a good story of a gang of moonlighters who had shot a landlord, and were afterwards sitting down to supper. One man was just raising a piece of meat to his lips when the clock struck twelve. Instantly he dropped the meat. "Be jabers!" he said, "'tis Friday!" That was the _habit_ of abstaining from meat on a Friday. It had been drilled into his memory, and it acted mechanically. Conscience, then, is largely a matter of habit: it depends a great deal on what we are taught. But it is not wholly a matter of habit, nor does it depend wholly on our teaching. We all know that two brothers, born of the same parents, brought up in the same home, educated at the same school, taught the same moral lessons, may be quite different in the matter of conscience. One will shrink from giving pain, the other will be cruel; one will be quite truthful, the other will tell lies. And so to go back to our rifleman and our cricketer. Every novice does not flinch from the recoil, every batsman is not prudent. No. Because men are different by _nature_. Some boys are easy to train; some are not. Some are naturally obedient; some are not. Some are naturally cruel; some are naturally merciful. The conscience of a boy depends upon what he is by nature and what he is taught.