Conscience has sometimes been described as the voice of God in the soul, or as the personal presence and influence of God himself. But we must not identify conscience with God. D. W. Faunce: “Conscience is not God,—it is only a part of one’s self. To build up a religion about one’s own conscience, as if it were God, is only a refined selfishness—a worship of one part of one’s self by another part of one’s self.” In The Excursion, Wordsworth speaks of conscience as “God’s most intimate presence in the soul And his most perfect image in the world.” But in his Ode to Duty he more discreetly writes: “Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove, Thou who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free And calmst the weary strife of frail humanity!” Here is an allusion to the Hebrew Bath Kol. “The Jews say that the Holy Spirit spoke during the Tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first Temple by the Prophets, and under the second Temple by the Bath Kol—a divine intimation as inferior to the oracular voice proceeding from the mercy seat as a daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother. It is also used in the sense of an approving conscience. In this case it is the echo of the voice of God in those who by obeying hear” (Hershon’s Talmudic Miscellany, 2, note). This phrase, “the echo of God’s voice,” is a correct description of conscience, and Wordsworth probably had it in mind when he spoke of duty as “the daughter of the voice of God.” Robert Browning describes conscience as “the great beacon-light God sets in all.... The worst man upon earth ... knows in his conscience more Of what right is, than arrives at birth In the best man’s acts that we bow before.” Jackson, James Martineau, 154—The sense of obligation is “a piercing ray of the great Orb of souls.” On Wordsworth’s conception of conscience, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 365-368.