One evening, at a small literary gathering, a lady, famous for her “muslin theology,” was bewailing the wickedness of the Jews in not receiving our Saviour, and ended a diatribe by expressing regret that He had not appeared in our own time. “How delighted,” said she, “we should all be to throw our doors open to Him, and listen to His Divine precepts! Don’t you think so, Mr. Carlyle?” The sturdy philosopher thus appealed to, said, in his broad Scotch, “No, madam, I don’t. I think that, had He come very fashionably dressed, with plenty of money, and preaching doctrines palatable to the higher orders, I might have had the honour of receiving from you a card of invitation, on the back of which would be written, ‘To meet our Saviour’; but if He had come uttering His sublime precepts, and denouncing the Pharisees, and associating with publicans and lower orders, as He did, you would have treated Him much as the Jews did, and would have cried out, ‘Take Him to Newgate and hang Him!’”
Imprisoned conscience
Do we not all know that honest friends have sometimes fallen out of favour, perhaps with ourselves, because they have persistently kept telling us what our consciences and common sense knew to be true, that if we go on that road we shall be suffocated in a bog? A man makes up his mind to a course of conduct. He has a shrewd suspicion that his honest friend will condemn, and that the condemnation will be right. What does he do, therefore? He never tells his friend, and if, by chance, that friend may say what was expected of him, he gets angry with his adviser and goes his road. I suppose we all know what it is to treat our consciences in the style in which Ahab treated Micaiah. We do not listen to them because we know what they will say before they have said it. And we call ourselves sensible people! Martin Luther once said: “It is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience.” But Ahab puts Micaiah in prison, and we shut up our consciences in a dungeon, and put a gag in their mouths, and a muffler over the gag, that we may hear them say no word, because we know what we are doing, and we aredoggedly determined to do, is wrong. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
