A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

INTRODUCTION.xvMuch unkindness and neglect and insolence may beshown to servants, tenants, and to helpless dependents,and yet the individual remain exempt from the punishmentof the laws. The base arts with which theseducer steals the assent of confiding innocence, asliterally as if he abstracted property from a dwellinghouse, cannot be checked by human law. There areunnumbered devices by which the villain may entangleand circumvent and withhold the property of the widowand the orphan, which evade the cognizance of humanlaws. Against these and ten thousand other acts ofoppression, the great Father of all has interposed bytransfusing into our nature a few simple feelings. Ahorror lowers upon the heart of the unprincipled man,when he contemplates an act of cruelty or of injury,which preserves him so far guiltless, and his intendedvictim safe. He feels within him a preparation for hispunishment before he becomes guilty : he hears a voice,heard by none but himself, but which will be heard byhim, telling him that his own soul shall become hisaccuser; assuring him also, that there is a voice inevery other human bosom ready to join its reproacheswith his own, and to render his life one continuedscene of agony from within and of execration fromwithout. The immense utility of such a principlerenders it highly probable that it would be bestowed.3. It may now be permitted to state the direct proofswhich establish the opinion that conscience is an originalfaculty.An eminent writer* asserts, that in all languagesthere are words which signify duty and interest : thatalthough these terms coincide in their application,* Dugald Stewart.