By the supremacy of conscience is meant its right to exercise moral control. It expresses its proper authority. This authority is not to be thought of as original or independent, but as resting on and revealing the absolute authority of God, who has constituted the moral relations of the world and has set the conscience, with its discerning and regulative function, in the human soul. The question involved is not the right of one merely subjective faculty to impose obligation on another faculty or on all the human capacities and powers—one part of the personal self playing the role of sovereign over the other parts. This would be a shallow and misleading notion of this authority. The whole conception of the conscience is theistic, and implies, as it also testifies to, an absolute law of righteousness over all the world, established by Him who is creator and sovereign of all. It is in the discernment of this principle of rightness, with its demand for obedience to it, that the conscience comes into its position of authority and its authority becomes de jure supreme.

1. But the proof that such authority rightly belongs to it needs to be more fully exhibited. It is explained and made unquestionable in the following facts:

(1) It is involved in the very sphere of its discernments. This sphere is the sphere of right and duty, which, by very conception, subordinate everything else. Its primary perception is of "the right," as having claim on every rational free agent—and then of obligation which immediately presses its moral requirement into the presence of our capacity for conformity to it. There is, indeed, a degree of authority belonging to each and all the psychical faculties, in the functions they fulfil for the direction and welfare of life. But the peculiarity of the conscience is that the realm of its functions and direction is higher than that of the other powers, the realm in which manhood reaches its supreme purpose and worth. Moral goodness, excellence of character, is the summit of the ascent to which human nature is adapted. In this our nature reaches the "supreme" and all-inclusive "good," compared with which all things else are of inferior claim and merit. The authority of the conscience, as a faculty, is thus identified with the supremacy which belongs to the idea of the morally right, of obligation, duty, the irrepealable "ought" for the conduct of life.

(2) This is more distinctly apparent when we recall the nature of its action. Psychologically, the conscience does not stand as a thing of our own personal will, or as in any way making the obligation which it presents. When we examine it, as it appears in our consciousness, its movement is in the form of a necessary perception of an obligation that is upon us irrespective of our will, a law of duty not of our own framing, but imposing itself on us and demanding the homage of our will. It possesses its authority, therefore, in the fact that it is the discernment of something higher than our will or ourselves, a principle transcending our personality and appearing as supreme law for our life and conduct. And the law connotes a lawgiver and a judge. The conscience thus puts us in the presence of One who has sovereign and absolute right to rule in us and over us. It thus becomes authoritative by its being the power or faculty through which is made known to us the principle or law of righteousness which God has established for the moral order of the world.24

(3) These facts, at once psychologically and metaphysically well certified, would themselves be sufficient to explain and vindicate the peculiar right of supremacy almost universally conceded to belong to the moral sense. But the proof, thus given, is confirmed by the fact that the contrary conclusion involves a manifest absurdity.

In the first place, it is incredible to suppose that man, as an intelligent, rational, free agent, capable of character, should have no provision in his mental make-up, no faculty of knowledge, furnishing a principle of guidance for meeting the responsibilities of life. For, such an absence of endowment for this purpose, would necessarily mean, either that responsibility is an illusion, a conclusion belied by the hard fact that the organization of human life inexorably treats and exacts it as real, or that man's nature is constructed in a falsehood, being bound to a high task for which it contains no endowment. Somewhere, therefore, among the human faculties, must appear a power or complex of powers whose disclosures or impulses shall furnish a rightful principle of control. To say that there is no rightful principle—that the morally good has no more right than the morally bad—would be not only absurd to reason, but fly in the face of the spontaneous and ineradicable sense of mankind, which makes the moral distinction.

Further: While the authority for self-control, to meet the ethical task and responsibilities of life, must thus be found somewhere in man's constitution, careful consideration makes it also clear that the right of supremacy cannot be attributed to any other capacity, function or impulse of our nature. The well-known argumentum ad absurdum is fully applicable here.

Besides the conscience itself, the only other motive-forces for conduct are the physiological appetites, the desires for enjoyment, and the benevolent affections. The right of supreme control cannot be supposed to belong to the physical appetites and passions. The supremacy of these would be subversive of character and deadly to personal and social welfare. This is not simply the judgment of reason, but a fact attested by the most melancholy experiences in which blight and woe have fallen on men. Nor can the right of ruling authority belong to the desire of enjoyment. When this dominates it becomes the reign of selfishness, which, according to the consent of mankind, is utterly inconsistent with the development of noble character, or the discharge of those inter-human duties on which both individual and social well-being depends. It forms the soul of anarchy, in which the family, society, and the state would be dissolved. The true excellence and happiness of man would be impossible. The rulership of this class of motive forces is thus inconsistent with the highest and best ends to which his nature has been correlated.

Nor can the supremacy belong to the benevolent affections. These, summed up in the word love, are indeed very high and must be regarded as among the worthiest and best elements of character and principles of action. "God is love," and so near does love come to being the very essence of virtue, that it is declared to be "the fulfilling of the law." But the "love" that God is said to be is not alone in His character, nor does it rule without regard to holiness, justice, purity, or righteousness. It cannot be conceived as subordinating these to a desire to make creatures happy. On the other hand we are obliged to think of love as able to confer its favors only in accordance with the principle of righteousness. Even in its supreme exhibition, in the salvation of men, in giving its gifts, it could only act through a way that declared the divine righteousness while granting forgiveness to those that repent and forsake wrong. In human life, the love that in its own degree and order helps to the fulfillment of the law is not alone, or unregulated, or superior to the principle of duty, of truth, purity and holiness. It cannot get above these, but is itself right only when it holds its ends, of making its objects happy, in subordination to what is morally good. We must remind ourselves exactly what the supremacy of the benevolent affections would mean. Unless guided in the action through which they reach their object, they would subject everything to their own ends and take no account of the character of the ways and means, as right or wrong. As unregulated love they would lack an essential element for the office of moral control. If it be true, as it unquestionably is, that some things are wrong, no matter how lovingly they may be done, the benevolent affections cannot be the supreme guide for even the loving activities of life. Blind affection may run, as it does in thousands of relations and instances, into the widest departures from good character and into gross vices. However high the benevolent feeling may be as a motive, all its purposes and the activities through which these purposes are accomplished need the guidance of the law of righteousness, if they are to be maintained in harmony with essential virtue, holy character and human welfare. Their function must therefore be held subordinate to the authority of conscience as the capacity through which the law of rectitude, with its obligation, is presented and kept before the mental view. This conclusion does not remove love from its high position, at the very summit of things that are right and good and essential for character. It allows it to stand, as it does all other springs of action, in its full rights and value among human motives and virtues in determining duty in conduct. But it is the conscience, and not love itself, that judges and decides the obligation to it and the high rank that ought to be given it as an element of character. Thus the regulative function, even for benevolence, belongs to the ethical sense, through perception of what sentiments and acts are right in conduct. And so the peculiar business of the conscience is to watch all the forces of our nature and keep each in its place.

The view which gives the right of moral control to the conscience is thus vindicated by the plain fact that there is no other faculty or spring of action in the human constitution adapted to this function, so unquestionably requisite for the order and welfare of life.

2. An apparent difficulty, however, arises in connection with this conclusion. It calls for a brief consideration, lest it should be thought to form a refutation of the correctness of our view:

It comes from the acknowledged fallibility of the conscience. This seems, at first sight, inconsistent with a right to such ruling authority. If its discernment of duty in particular relations may not be fully clear and is liable to be misled, how can it be justly regarded as having this authoritative office? If its applicatory judgments are often found erroneous and need to be revised and superseded by better judgments, can we fairly hold it as charged with such regulative function? In different men, as already stated, it exhibits differing and even conflicting directions. In different nations and times its indications of duty fail to agree. Advance in civilization, knowledge and culture is marked by higher ethical standards, modifying, if not reversing, former judgments. But this large fact, so unquestionable and, apparently, so formidable, becomes, when analyzed, easily reconcilable with the position of authority given to the conscience-discernments and imperatives. For a faculty may be highest in human nature, and yet, like every other capacity, limited. Its functional action may be comparatively undeveloped, or may be strengthened and clarified. In its applicatory judgments, for fixing the ethical law of right in all the varied and complex relations and conditions of human life, it is dependent on all the subordinate faculties for the requisite light. Whatever limitations may rest on its ability, whatever partialness may mark its development, whatever complications may perplex it in adjusting duty to all the actual situations in human life, it yet remains the faculty through which the law of duty is disclosed to view, and if duty is not indicated through it, it is not indicated through any human insight at all. But no faculty loses its own particular special authority in its own place by its natural limitations and liability to error. Authority must not be confounded with infallibility. Despite its fallibility every faculty of the soul carries the authority for its own psychical office—the intellect for knowledge, the sensibility for feeling, the will for choices. The sense-perception has decisive authority for phenomena about us, the logical faculty for just conclusions from given data, the memory for recall of past experiences, the intuitional reason for axiomatic truths and first principles. If the liability to error in the psychic functions and their application to the myriad conditions in which their immediate data are used, does not vacate their place of authority in their spheres, no more does the similar liability vacate the unique authority of the conscience, which it has by its action in the supreme realm of the right and of moral obligation. Its position of authority in its sphere remains, and remains supreme, because the sphere of its action and discernments is, as pointed out, the supreme sphere of eternal righteousness and obligation.

But a further question arises at this point. If it is sometimes in error and, like an imperfect watch, gives an incorrect indication, should the conscience always be followed? Does not this fact, if it does not wholly take away its right to supremacy, at least modify the positiveness of our duty to follow its dictates? This has sometimes been a perplexing casuistic question. But the perplexity arises from failure to keep in mind the precise points involved in the problem, and to take account of the whole process through which particular duties become apparent and obligatory. Since the decision of the conscience, when rightly and fully reached, is, at the time it is given and as to the point it decides, the soul's conviction as to what is right and duty, to violate or disregard it becomes necessarily the very essence of the immoral spirit and conduct. To go contrary to what the soul sees as duty, through the only capacity it has for knowing it, is essentially moral rottenness. Whewell's statement: "To disobey the commands and prohibitions of conscience, under any circumstances, is utterly immoral: it is the very essence of immorality,"25 is hardly too emphatic. To some writers this has seemed extravagant, in view of the fact that some of the greatest wrongs and foulest crimes of history, such as the burning of Latimer and Ridley, the St. Bartholomew massacre, the gun-powder plot, might be palliated or even justified under the plea of conscientiousness in the perpetrators.26 But the reconciliation of this seeming conflict between conscience and real duty is made plain by remembering two things:

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.

Secondly, the crimes and wrongs often attributed to obeying the conscience are, probably, not fairly credited to the action of conscience at all. We must distinguish what men, even conscientious men, have done or do in the name of conscience, and what the moral judgment itself has pointed out and urged as duty. It is safe to affirm that nearly all these crimes have come not by the light and dictates of the conscience, but by its suppression. There are, as all history, observation and experience testify, many other strong and bad motive-forces in human nature. The appetites and passions, the lusts of ambition, the desire of wealth and power, the striving for place and fame, the willfulness of selfishness and prejudice, are forever suggesting their objects, filling the soul with their varied and plausible pleadings, until life is driven hither and thither under the restless forces. In some men these forces hardly allow any place for the conscience to act. Not from the intuition of the moral sense or the force of conscience, but from the suggestion and direction of other motives, come the crimes that are credited to zeal inspired by conscience. Conscience is not at the helm in this business. The wrongs are a result of failure to consult its dictates—of the force and direction of other elements and tendencies of action in human nature. It was not conscience that burnt Latimer and Ridley, but intolerant fanatical hate, hot passion ruling the hour. It was not conscience that made St. Bartholomew's day full of cruelty, blood and horror, but prejudice, hatred, the unreasoning rush of excited passions. It may, indeed, seem plausible to say "that day was made by the Church's conscience asserting the duty of repressing or overthrowing heresy." And it is conceivable that that conscience should testify against the evil of heresy, and the duty of endeavoring to overcome it. But the suggestion of torture, blood and slaughter as the means of such repression, was not the work of conscience. Its guidance was thrust aside in that conduct. For this use of violence, cruelty and murder, with all their repulsive horrors, conscience did not give the command, even as God did not.

The truth with respect to the authority of conscience may be summed up as its right to control our lives in all things involving moral quality or character. Specifically: (1) In the regulation of our physical appetencies; (2) In the use to which we put our intellectual endowments and capacities; (3) In the direction and relations in which we use our emotional and affectional capacities, embracing our natural disposition, desires and aims; (4) In deciding our choices or the way we use our power of free self-determination, covering our intentions and aims; and (5) In the use we make of our capacities for physical action by which thought, feeling and the preferences of choice are turned into conduct which either fulfils or violates the duties which are evolved by our relations to being around us or above us. The authority of conscience touches at each and all of these different points, because at each and all human life is taking shape in moral character, as either conformed to duty or variant from it. Our personal life is, in its deepest reality, a single self-conscious unit, and the action of all its capacities and powers needs to be rhythmically adjusted to the morally good. But the imperative of the conscience addresses itself pre-eminently and peculiarly to the will, or the personal self as free in choosing, and thus capable of directing and using all the personal capacities and functions. It is upon the self as free-will, as the self-determining and directive power, that the responsibility for the conduct of life is thrown, and through it, if at all, the responsibility is to be met.

And this authority becomes supreme not by any arbitrary right of one subjective faculty over another or over all the rest, but from the fact of the supremacy of what the conscience discerns and discloses, the authority of right over wrong, the obligation to eternal righteousness. Righteousness is king.