humanity ask, Why? Love and compassion ask, _Why?_ I believe we must find the answer chiefly in the failure to understand clearly the nature and functions of the mind. The Nature of Conscience. Turn, for example, to conscience. What is its nature? Is it a safe guide? Does it always tell us what is right? Why has conscience fought on both sides of every great historical conflict? Surely we should stay this awful, pitiable and destructive conflict of the conscientious; at least, long enough to examine most earnestly into the cause of this strange and disastrous puzzle. If conscience is not a safe guide, then woe betide us; for it is the only moral guide we have, or, at least, the only avenue through which human and divine truth can guide us. For it is the moral nature itself. The eye without light cannot see, but if we are lost in a forest, the eye becomes helpless as a guide, even if there is light. Yet the eye is a safe guide, and in bodily movements it is essentially the only guide we have. We thus learn that to exercise their function the eyes must have light and knowledge of the localities in which they are to act as a guide. What the eyes are in guiding our bodily movements, that the conscience is in guiding our moral actions. But as the eyes without light and knowledge are helpless as a guide, so conscience without love and truth is a blind monster. There is conscience and _conscience_. And as long as we use the term ambiguously and fail to discriminate between conscience proper and the term as used in the looser, larger sense, we will have nothing but confusion. Conscience proper is simply the impulse of the soul that urges us to do right as we see the right. We do not deny that it also embodies the basic element in the soul that enables us to discover what is right; but our conviction as to what is right is dependent upon knowledge acquired through other faculties. When we speak of conscience in the loose and general sense, we refer to both of these elements. In this sense conscience is the product of a number of faculties working together. Thus when we talk about following conscience, we mean following the voice of our moral nature, or the convictions of the highest and best aspirations in our soul. Conscience should always be followed as a guide in both its proper and larger sense; but as an impulse to do what we believe to be right, it is infallible, while as a guide to knowledge of what is right, it is fallible and liable to lead us into all kinds of folly and error.