But how can it be, we ask, that the exclusive service of God in all things will not narrow our life? How can God be so “jealous” without restricting our legitimate freedom of expansion? For this reason: that God contains everything in Himself, the whole sum of being; so that there is no beauty or truth or goodness in the world which does not fall to you to delight in as part of your love and service of God. Loving God and serving Him should lead you to watch for and respond to all the truth and beauty that there is in God’s world, all the traits of excellence in human character, and to own your allegiance to your family, to your friends, to your country, to your Church, and to humanity as a whole. “All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours,” if “ye are Christ’s,” as “Christ is God’s.”[73] Never let us fear then that to put God first and serve Him utterly will narrow any faculty or dwarf any capacity. It can but fill with an evergrowing largeness every vital force of our being, every instinct of our life. “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” But we must notice the warning which our Lord gives us as to a possible condition of our conscience. The light that is in us may be darkness. We so often talk as if we were only obliged to “follow our conscience:” as if no one could lay anything to our charge unless we were acting against the present voice of conscience. But this is a very perilous error. We are also obliged to enlighten our conscience and to keep it enlightened. It is as much liable to error as our uninstructed intelligence, as much liable to failure as our sight. Probably of every ten criminals brought up before judge and jury on account of some crime the majority were not, at the time of its commission, acting against their conscience. They had stifled or darkened that long ago. There is, I believe, nothing to which in our time attention needs to be called more than to the fact that conscience is only a _faculty_ for knowing God and His will. It is certain, unless it is educated, to give wrong information. And the way to educate it, is to put it to school with the “Light of the world.” Alas! there must be multitudes of respectable and self-enlightened people of whom it is true that the light which is in them is darkness.