To the Godly and Impartial Reader
Worthy reader, I offer these thoughts against liberty of conscience to your impartial and candid judgment. Because this position presents itself to me with the face of atheism, I call its advocates Libertines. I do not intend to strike at any godly person or wound those whom weakness has made captive to this error. My purpose is to stir up in the godly a detestation of a position that truly springs from libertinism. It reeks of loose, reckless, atheistic thoughts about God’s majesty, as though our conscience possessed a royal prerogative independent of any rule. More monstrous still, it places conscience, in its simple apprehensions of God, the Mediator, and God’s revealed will, above God’s law.
1. This approach introduces Aristotle’s “So I think” and the world’s “Everyone says so.” Our faith and hope must then be reduced to skepticism’s first principle: “So it seems to me.” On this account, the young daughters of the mind, its simple acts of apprehending and knowing God and believing divine truths, are innocent, harmless workings of the soul. They stand outside the dominion both of free will and of divine law. If toleration prevails, the mind becomes a freeborn, absolute princess. In its operations concerning the infinitely sovereign God and his revealed will, it can no more incur guilt under this lawless system than fire can be prosecuted for burning, the sun for giving light, or a stone for falling downward.
2. All certainty of belief; all steadfastness, rootedness, and unshakable establishment in the truth; all the life of Scripture’s consolations and comforts; all the peace of heavenly confidence; all joy “unspeakable and full of glory”; all “lively hope”; all patient, submissive waiting for the harvest’s fruit; all wrestling in prayer, glorying in tribulation, triumph in praise, and rejoicing in the Spirit: all these, if founded on fallible opinions and the doubtful disputes of skeptics, may be no more than the spinning of windmills, attractive fantasies, and dreams. “For who,” they ask, “is infallible? And who hath known the mind of the Lord?” Must truth therefore be monopolized by one sect or position? Who can, in faith or full assurance, convince or “rebuke gainsayers,” heretics, or those who “bring another doctrine”? Might not you who convince and rebuke be “gainsayers” and “heretics,” people who “bring another doctrine,” just as readily as those whom you work so hard to convince and rebuke?
3. Conscience thereby becomes each person’s rule, umpire, judge, Bible, and God. If he follows it, he is, at worst, a godly, pious, holy heretic, who fears his conscience more than his Creator and whom you must judge a saint.
4. Once conscience is deified, all rebuke, exhortation, counterargument, and even the entire ministry of the gospel must be set aside. No one may judge a brother to be an idolater or a Familist, or judge saints to be Socinians, or “men of corrupt minds, perverse disputers, vain-janglers, wresters,” rackers or torturers “of Scripture, whose words eat as a canker, who subvert whole houses, who speak the visions of their own head, and see false burdens.” Such people existed long ago, but now they have quite disappeared from the world! For who can make a window into another person’s soul and see that obstinacy of heart which alone, on this account, essentially constitutes the heretic, blasphemer, or false prophet?
But do we not owe brotherly forbearance and Christian indulgence to brethren, saints, and truly godly people whose errors and mental infirmities arise naturally before free will can intervene?
I will answer in these few considerations.
1. God’s children should earnestly pray and plead that, where there are two opinions, there may be one heart. May the Father of spirits unite the hearts of all who are children of one Father and heirs of one house.
2. Papists have gone to the extreme of boundless domination and tyranny over people’s consciences. Whatever contradicts the lawless decrees of their councils and popes is an unpardonable heresy, to be purged only by fire and burning wood. Whoever refuses to subject his conscience to that enemy of Christ, that mistress of witchcraft on “whose skirts is found the blood of the martyrs of Jesus,” is immediately a heretic, and his arguments are answered by burning him alive. We reject this tyranny over conscience. Yet that is no reason to embrace the opposite extreme of unrestrained toleration.
3. We cannot doubt that all saints on this side of glory carry errors, mistakes, and “prophesying in part” with them toward heaven. Even the fairest stars and lights in the church’s lower firmament are clouded. The moon’s light serves to illuminate the lower garden of lilies, “where Christ feedeth, till the day break, and the shadows flee away.” Here brotherly indulgence must have its place, as we repay one another the debt of compassionate forbearance toward each other’s infirmities.
4. Yet one grace cannot conflict with another. Removing the foxes that destroy the vines cannot contradict the saints’ gentleness and meekness in fulfilling the law of love and bearing one another’s burdens. Nor can the love essential to a child born again contradict zeal for God in confronting a straying saint to his face, when he is “walking not with a straight foot according to the truth of the Gospel” (Gal 2:14). If sincerely followed, this course should produce greater unity of heart and give a straying sheep greater evidence of faithfulness than our cruel meekness and bloody gentleness. We pretend to bear with tender consciences under the appearance of paying a debt of counterfeit love, while through silence and merciless sympathy with their sinful corruption of the truth we allow millions to perish.
Farewell.
Yours in the Lord Jesus,
S. R.
Chapter 1: Conscience and Its Nature
“And herein do I exercise myself to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward man” (Acts 24:16).
This forms part of Paul’s defense before Festus the governor. He dares to bring his conscience before his accusers. The subject of this part is conscience.
We find here, first, the subject: conscience. Second, its quality: freedom from offense. Its completeness and perfection also appear: as a religious man, Paul acts “toward God” in the duties of the first table of the law; as a man of upright conduct, he acts “toward man” in the duties of the second table. Third, this is no occasional practice, taken up when a warm flush of godliness comes over him. It is “always,” at all times. Fourth, his conscience does not lie unused beside him like a miser’s gold, which sees neither sun nor wind for many years. It walks in the streets and acts. “Herein,” that is, in this religion and hope of the resurrection, “do I labor or exercise myself.” This is the field I plow. Fifth, there is significant grammar in the object of this exercise: “I labor to have,” to be lord, master, and owner of a good conscience. A conscience is one thing; to have a conscience is another. Often the conscience has the man and lords it over him, or rather tyrannizes over a Judas, while the man does not have command of his conscience. These five points encompass the length and breadth of a good conscience.
I will therefore consider conscience, and then a good conscience. Concerning conscience, I will speak first a little about its name, and then about the thing itself.
The Hebrews express conscience by the name “heart.” I grant that it signifies the mind, understanding, and will, and figuratively denotes the heart: “And David’s heart smote him” (2 Sam 24:10). Solomon says to Shimei in 1 Kings 2:44, “Thou knowest all the evil that thy heart” (thy conscience) “is privy to.”
Conscience is knowledge with a witness. It is observed that the Greek word for “conscience,” used about thirty-two times in the New Testament, is used by the translators only once in the Old Testament, in Eccl 10:20. It therefore signifies that a man has a fellow observer, so to speak, alongside him: God, who first and perfectly knows a man’s ways and thoughts. His conscience is a subordinate witness and an observer with God, but a dim and blind observer compared with God.
Second, its knowledge is not as broad as that of the whole understanding. It is restricted to the man’s actions, words, thoughts, and condition or state, whether he is in Christ or not in Christ. It signifies practical knowledge: a verb in the Niphal form means to have a heart or to be practically wise. In Job 11:12, “Vain man would have a heart,” or be hearted and wise; and in Song 4:9, “Thou hast taken away my heart,” or “unhearted me, my sister, my spouse.”
Second, “heart” also stands for a word meaning a picture. In Job 38:36, “Who hath given understanding to the heart,” the word signifies skillful engraving, ingeniously devised by the understanding. It denotes an excellent picture, pleasing to see, from a root meaning to behold and to paint. All the inventions, pictures, and engraved works in the soul are in the conscience. Sinners draw on their conscience and heart many attractive fantasies, pictures, and engraved images of imagined pleasures. The Hebrews also use the word “spirit” for conscience.
“The Lord saveth the broken in spirit” (Ps 34:18). “A wounded spirit who can bear it?” (Prov 18:4). In that language, “spirit” signifies the whole soul (Eccl 3:21; Eccl 8:8), and the soul’s whole strength, marrow, courage, and flower (Job 6:8). “There was no more spirit in them” (Josh 5:1). Conscience is everything: it is the good or best, or the evil or worst, in a person. If he keeps conscience, all is safe; if he loses conscience, all is gone. It is the soul’s essence, its rose, its one precious thing. The body is clay and ore; conscience is the person’s gold.
Concerning conscience, I propose to consider its nature, its object, its office, its kinds, and its accompanying properties: liberty of conscience, and that much-disputed prerogative of freedom in opinions and religions from restraints that people can impose.
Theologians consider conscience as a principle of our actions in relation to what the Lord commands in the law and the gospel. Here it must be considered in three ways.
1. Conscience in its abstract nature, though only as it exists in humanity. I say nothing of the conscience of angels or devils.
2. Conscience as good or bad. Before the fall, Adam’s conscience possessed great perfection. Glorified spirits carry a good conscience into heaven, while the damned take an evil conscience, a piece of hell within them, into hell. Yet there was no evil conscience in Adam, nor can there be one in the glorified. Neither can there be in them such incidental acts of conscience as accusing, smiting, and tormenting.
3. Conscience as acting well or badly. It influences the affections, producing a feast of joy or stirring up faith, hope, sadness, and so forth.
As for its nature, conscience seems to me to be a power of the practical understanding by which a person is bound and directed to judge himself: his state and condition, and all his actions, inclinations, thoughts, and words.
1. It is a power of understanding, not an act, an actual judgment, or a habit. It is not a faculty distinct from the understanding. It is the understanding as it passes judgment in court on a person’s state and all his ways: whether he is in God’s favor and, now, whether he is in Christ, and on all his inward and outward movements and actions.
(1) It appears not to be an act, because obliging, directing, and accusing are acts of conscience and therefore do not flow from other acts. It is true that “the thoughts” are said “to accuse, or excuse” (Rom 2:15). But “thoughts” there means conscience itself. It does not first think and then accuse. Rather, conscience breathes out the bad or good fragrance of challenging and accusing, or excusing and comforting, thoughts and acts.
All acts flow either from young powers, which they call capacities, or from stronger, older, more deeply rooted powers, which they call habits. Ames says, “Things produced by motion, and motion itself, are the effects of the mover,” and “therefore the act of accusing may be from the conscience, which is an act.” This inference cannot stand. It is true that motion and the thing produced by motion come from the mover. But the act of moving comes from the mover as he exercises his power. Similarly, directing and accusing come from the power in the practical understanding, not from the act of understanding. In this case that act is simply the act of accusing, and nothing can come from itself as its cause. But the best of these thinkers take conscience to be a power of the understanding: Thomas, Cajetan, Richard, Gregory of Valencia, Vasquez, and Tanner.
(2) When believers or wicked people go to sleep and take off their clothes, they do not take off their consciences. Although conscience does not sleep with the person, it does not necessarily act during sleep by accusing or excusing. It therefore remains in the person as a power that is not always acting.
2. It is a power of understanding and belongs to judgment and understanding. “Judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard” (Isa 5:3). Some, such as Henriquez, make it an inclination of the will, and Durandus seems not far from this view. Some say it belongs to both. But the will is not a knowing faculty; conscience is. “For oftentimes also thine heart knoweth that thou also hast cursed others” (Eccl 7:22).
There is more reason and sound knowledge in conscience than in the whole understanding soul. It is a crystal globe of reason, the soul’s beam, sun, and candle. To know God and creatures in our relation of obligation to God in Christ is the rose, blossom, and flower of knowledge (John 17:3). To see God, his beauty expressed in Christ, and the beauty and incomparable glory of his lovable, lovely essence as presented to us in Christ, is conscience’s highest reach.
(1) If conscience is so divine a thing, filled to the brim with reason and light, then the more knowledge there is, the more conscience there is, just as more fire means more heat and more sun means more light. When imagination passes for conscience, conscience must be turned into a dream. This happens with enthusiasts and new spirits groping beyond God’s word: a new angel recommended only for its newness, a white angel outside and a black angel within. Novelty, too, can pass for conscience. Our nature is quickly taken with something new: a new friend, field, house, garden, or garment. So a new Christ, a new faith, delights us for a time. Heresy also passes for conscience. Some people’s consciences imagine that killing their children to Molech was a doctrine that entered God’s heart to command (Jer 7:30-31).
(2) A conscience without knowledge is without goodness. Silence and dumbness are not peace. An innocent, toothless conscience that cannot see, hear, or speak cannot bark, much less bite before it has teeth. Such a conscience makes a bargain with the sinner: “Leave me alone. Let me sleep until the smoke of hell’s furnace wakes me.” If there is any feeling or life, fire can bring it out; a worm at the heart can bear witness if it has any life. This conscience is like the service book, the Mass, or the Popish image. You merely see these things; they cannot speak or act upon the soul.
The nature of conscience becomes clearer from its office and object, the second and third particulars proposed. To speak more distinctly of these, we must establish what sort of knowledge belongs to conscience.
Conscience is not the simple judgment and apprehension of things insofar as they can be known. That belongs to speculative understanding. Conscience is the power to know things, ourselves, and our actions in relation to obeying and serving God. But is conscience a simple practical apprehension of things, or a combined and discursive apprehension?
Answer: Speculative understanding knows many things without reasoning, apprehending, for example, the sun, heaven, and the nature of motion. In its second operation it apprehends such things as that the sun is 167 times greater than the earth. Yet it directs both the first and second operations of the mind toward knowing things by reasoning. Similarly, conscience as conscience apprehends God, Christ, and sin in its first operation. In its second, it apprehends that God is infinite and Christ the one, choicest Savior. It is brought to completion and perfection in a reasoned argument or syllogism, wholly directed toward our practice and faith.
Thus Cain reasons: “Whoever kills his brother does not have eternal life. But I have killed my brother. Therefore I do not have eternal life.”
And David and Paul reason: “Whoever believes in him who justifies the ungodly is justified and saved. But I believe in him who justifies the ungodly. Therefore I am justified and saved.”
Knowledge of the major premise by itself is an act of conscience, just as denying and disbelieving it is an act of a blinded and evil conscience. But conscience is complete in knowing the whole syllogism. Hence they identify the conserving faculty (conscience’s storehouse and treasury, the habit or power that judges the law of nature) with the major premise, or the principles of right and wrong written naturally in the heart. This is why conscience, in relation to the premise, is called the law. In relation to the minor premise, conscience is a witness, a spy sent from heaven to record all the facts. This premise includes our deeds, actions, words, thoughts, inclinations, habits of sin or grace, and our state and condition. In relation to the conclusion, the third proposition, conscience is a judge and God’s deputy. It is one and the same conscience performing all three functions: law, witness, and judge.
The conserving power of the soul is the faculty in which the moral principles of right and wrong, known by the light of nature, are hidden and stored. It is therefore part of natural conscience. Scripture and gospel truths are also stored there. These are known by the light of a star of greater magnitude, namely the candle shining in divine revelation. This is part of enlightened and supernatural conscience.
