Dr Schenkel has fully set forth his reasons for holding that conscience is the religious organ of the soul, in the ninth chapter of the first volume of his 'Christliche Dogmatik.' He endeavours to meet the objection urged in the text by representing what is truly the primary and distinctive function of conscience as a secondary and derivative function. Its primary activity is, according to him, religious; it unites with God--it is conscious communion with Him. Its ethical activity is only elicited when this communion is disturbed and broken; its source is the religious want occasioned by the rupture of communion. That is felt to be a something abnormal and unsatisfactory, and awakens a desire after the restoration of the lost communion with God. The conscience is cognisant of a moral law only when, its communion with God being disturbed, it seeks its re-establishment Dr Schenkel thus, as he thinks, accounts for conscience having an ethical function as well as a religious function. But clearly the result at which he arrives is in direct contradiction to the position from which he starts. The affirmation of conscience as religious is represented as being that man is in direct communion with God; and the affirmation of conscience as ethical is represented as being that man is not in direct communion with God, but desires to be so. These are, however, contrary declarations; and to describe conscience in the way Schenkel does, as "a synthesis of the ethical and religious factor," is to represent it as a synthesis of self-contradictory elements--a compound of yes and no. We cannot be conscious both of communion with God and of non-communion with Him. And, on Dr Schenkel's own showing, the evidence for immediate communion with Him is but small. The consciousness of moral law he affirms to be consciousness of the want or need of communion with God, not the consciousness of enjoying it. But is conscience ever independent of the consciousness of moral law? If not, it can never, according to the hypothesis, be a consciousness of God. If it be independent thereof, the fact would require to be better proved than by the misinterpretation of a few texts of Scripture. Solidly proved it never, I believe, can be. A conscience not conscious of a moral law is simply no conscience at all. NOTE XXVII., page 221. CHALMERS AND ERSKINE ON THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIENCE.