A TENDER CONSCIENCE.

Max I. Reich

[The Friend (Philadelphia), Third Month 2, 1916, pages 424-425.]

This Document is on The Quaker Writings Home Page.

One of the most precious things a man can possibly possess is a tender conscience. There are many hardening influences in the world. There are many forces at work that have a tendency to deaden and blunt the keen sensitiveness of the conscience, so that it is a great thing, indeed, to be favored to preserve its tenderness inviolate.

By a tender conscience, I do not mean a scrupulous or a morbid conscience. A scrupulous conscience is governed by its crotchets, and a morbid conscience by its fears, neither of these makes for a wholesome and happy life and a well balanced character.

A tender conscience is governed by the revealed will of God, that will which is always "good," "acceptable" and "perfect,'' even though the doing of it may involve self-denial and taking up the daily cross.

Now, how may one obtain this great blessing--a tender conscience? It will require "exercise." Said the apostle Paul: "Herein do I exercise myself to have always a conscience void of offense toward God and men." That is the keynote of a life in which peace may be known even in a hurricane of trouble, and wealth in direst poverty.

"A conscience void of offense toward God. and men," and that always. How calm and bright all is within, where this treasure is felt to be one's own! "The testimony of a good conscience" is another of Paul's great utterances on this subject. What music in the soul, amidst the harsh discords life!

What characterized "the Quaker of the olden time," as the poet Whittier has it, was just this one thing--he watched over his conscience, that it might be kept in the Holy tenderness, and thus be "void of offense towards God and men." It was the constant exercise of those worthy men and women into whose inheritance we have come by our outward profession of being "Friends" and by it "they obtained a good report."

"Herein do I exercise myself," said Paul. Such an exercise is no mere creaturely effort. It is a giving up to the pressure of the Divine Spirit upon us, the divine Love ever following us, brooding over us, compassing us in our path, besetting us before and behind, that we, welcoming it, even in its search [P425] ings, may be led by it, our of every evil thing in "the way everlasting."

May our young men and maidens come into and abide under this exercise, which was the secret of the saint's victory in former days. (From the Olney Current.)