First, that the conscience, being a complex faculty or power, its particular judgments of duty in particular cases, being judgments of application of the principle of rightness, are reached often through very complex processes, in which the obscuration of imperfect information, or misconception of the relations involved, or the misleading effect of prejudice created by wrong training, or some falsely imagined divine authority, may leave not only a state of doubt as to duty, but throw the decision into error. Examples of the process occur in daily experience. A question of duty is presented. We come to it with sincere, honest mind, and study it by taking into consideration all the facts and relations concerned. We get all the light we can, and we decide what the moral principle requires of us. This is the course that fair dealing with ourselves and duty requires us to pursue. But suppose that, after all this, in the fallibility of the applicatory judgments, we are thus led to do the very thing that "ought not" to be done, and violate instead of fulfil the duty which the actual relations call for from us. The following of conscience may thus have put "wrong" conduct, objectively viewed, in place of the "right" conduct which was due from us in the case. The deed, in its external form and bearing, may have been unfitting and one that ought not to have been done. But this is not the whole view or full account of the matter. For though, while in obeying our fallible conscience, we have thus failed to bring our whole outward action in the case into harmony with full duty, or have even done what to others about us or to God above us was wrong, we have maintained our own subjective personal moral integrity, in maintaining that which is the fundamental and essential element of all morality, the right intention and effort. This is the prime and the grandest element of all moral character, and is itself more than "four-fifths of conduct." There is such a thing as being innocent even when we have done what, viewed objectively, ought not to have been done. The aim, in genuine integrity of moral purpose, was to do right. The deed was a mistake. The moral status in which we may thus be placed as a result of following our conscience, is, ethically, at the opposite pole from that which we make ours when we disregard duty as fixed for us in and by our own moral judgments. This is disobedience to obligations as perceived and felt--an attitude in its nature immoral.