Dictionary of all Scriptures & Myths

CONSCIENCE 

The Divine judgment on problems of action formulated by the mind.

"And Agamemnon's dark heart was filled with great anger, and his eyes were like flashing fire. To Kalchas first spake he with look of ill: Thou seer of evil, never yet hast thou told me the thing that is pleasant. Evil is ever the joy of thy heart to prophesy, but never yet didst thou tell any good matter nor bring it to pass." - Iliad, Bk. I.

And forthwith the desire-mind is greatly perturbed by the reflections of the inner memory (Kalchas). And this reacts upon the lusts and desires of the lower self, which thereby become intensified, and cause the lower self to experience the sense of unsatisfied desire which proceeds from the dawn of the higher consciousness within the soul. The conscience decides that certain things are evil, and this being distasteful to the desire-mind, the sense of rebellion is stirred. The desire-mind realises that the higher mind always foresees evil, since indeed it is through the apprehension of folly that wisdom is awakened. And never was the higher nature stirred, save through the unwisdom and inexperience which the Self is called forth to combat. How, unless the desire-mind opposes the higher nature or inclination contends against conscience, shall the process of spiritual evolution be brought about?

"The voice of conscience tells us we ought to choose and follow the higher whenever desire comes into conflict with what we have learned to call duty. We cannot escape the struggle; indeed, we are here on earth that we may realise our divinity by means of that struggle; it is the very reason why there is an earthly life at all."- R. J. CAMPBELL, Serm., Our Eternal Glory.

"The claiming for a man of a conscience is not only to make him a responsible moral agent; it is, there and then, to endow him with the right of private judgment, to postulate the capacity on his part to agree with or dissent from certain received opinions; in short, to confer upon him the express privilege of deciding for himself in the light of some higher law or experience. . . . In contending for a man's conscience, religion has done nothing less than sanctify the rational nature in man. To acknowledge such a thing as a conscience is not only to claim for a man inner freedom,-the substitution of constraint from within, for coercion from without: it is an implicit avowal of Humanism." - R. DIMSDALE STOCKER, Social Idealism, p. 119.  

See Also

AGAMEMNON
HECATOMB
HIDING
KALCHAS
NOD OF ZEUS
VOICE OF GOD