The testimony of conscience on behalf of God has been presented in various ways, and it need not surprise us to find some of them unsatisfactory. I regard as unwarranted the view that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul," the sole faculty through which the human mind is in contact and communion with God. There is no one specific power or organ of the mind in virtue of which exclusively man is a religious being. It is by the whole make and constitution of his nature, not by a particular faculty, that he is framed for religion. I more than question if we have a right even to ascribe to conscience an immediate intuition of God. It brings us, some have affirmed, in a strict and positive sense into the real presence of God, with nothing intervening between us and Him--He as the absolute personality standing sharply and distinctly over against our personality. This doctrine has, however, one obvious and serious difficulty before it. Conscience--that is a word which has got in ordinary use a very clear and definite meaning. We all know what conscience is as well as we know what the eye or the ear is, and we all know what an act of conscience is as well as we know what seeing or hearing is. It is not more certain that by the eye we see colours, and that by the ear we hear sounds, than that by conscience we discern good and evil. When, therefore, any man comes and assures us that through conscience we have an immediate apprehension of God, it is natural that we should answer at once, You may as well assure us that through sight we immediately hear sounds or smell odours. What we immediately apprehend through conscience is the right or wrong in actions, and therefore not God. Morality is the direct object of conscience; God can therefore only be the presupposition or postulate of conscience,--can only be given in conscience as implied in morality. This, I say, is an obvious objection to the assertion that God is immediately known in conscience. It is an objection which has not been got over, and which, I believe, cannot be got over.[36] [36] See Appendix XXVI.