(b) The rationalist further objects that what is described by the supernaturalist as the human conscience is not a special faculty, unvarying and identical in all, but that it is in each individual a variable result of heredity, organisation, education, and general life-surroundings, enabling judgment by the individual on the consequence of events; that it affords no reliable clue to what is moral, for the general judgments of public conscience as embodied in public opinion, or in statute law, have varied in the same country in different ages to the extent sometimes of absolute and irreconcileable contradiction. That the individual conscience, so-called, varies in the same individual at different periods of his life and under different conditions of health. That at the present moment the judgments of conscience are on most material points in direct conflict in different parts of the world. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was moral in England to believe in witches, and it was a moral act to kill a witch. To-day it is held immoral to believe in witchcraft; to kill a witch would now be at law a criminal act. Witchcraft is so admittedly false that palmistry, conjuring, and fortune-telling are treated as punishable frauds. Yet from the supernatural point of view the reality of witchcraft is unquestionable, and the praiseworthiness of witchkilling is indisputable (_vide_ Exodus xxii, 18; Leviticus xix, 26-31, xx, 27; Deut. xviii, 10, 11; 1 Sam. xxviii). And in some of the districts of England where school boards are yet without influence and where godless education has been prevented, the pious ignorant folk still believe in charms, wise women, and white and black magic.