1. The first application is a personal one. It is this:--Do what _seems_ to _you_ to be right: it is only so that you will at last learn by the grace of God to see clearly what _is_ right. A man thinks within himself that it is God's law and God's will that he should act thus and thus. There is nothing possible for us to say--there is no advice for us to give, but this--"You _must_ so act." He is responsible for the opinions he holds, and still more for the way in which he arrived at them--whether in a slothful and selfish, or in an honest and truth-seeking manner; but being now his soul's convictions, you can give no other law than this--"You must obey your conscience." For no man's conscience gets so seared by doing what is wrong unknowingly, as by doing that which appears to be wrong to his conscience. The Jews' consciences did not get seared by their slaying the Canaanites, but they did become seared by their failing to do what appeared to them to be right. Therefore, woe to you if you do what others think right, instead of obeying the dictates of your own conscience; woe to you if you allow authority, or prescription, or fashion, or influence, or any other human thing, to interfere with that awful and sacred thing--responsibility. "Every man," said the apostle, "must give an account of himself to God." 2. The second application of this principle has reference to others. No doubt to the large, free, enlightened mind of the Apostle Paul, all these scruples and superstitions must have seemed mean, trivial, and small indeed. It was a matter to him of far less importance that truth should be _established_ than that it should be arrived at truly--a matter of far less importance even, that right should be done, than that right should be done rightly. Conscience was far more sacred to him than even liberty--it was to him a prerogative far more precious to assert the rights of Christian conscience, than to magnify the privileges of Christian liberty. The scruple may be small and foolish, but it may be impossible to uproot the scruple without tearing up the feeling of the sanctity of conscience, and of reverence to the law of God, associated with this scruple. And therefore the Apostle Paul counsels these men to abridge their Christian liberty, and not to eat of those things which had been sacrificed to idols, but to have compassion upon the scruples of their weaker brethren.