speech, that men find out epithets for conscience, which may entitle it to as many reproaches as men think fit to charge it with: they will have an erroneous conscience, which no doubt will contribute to as many evil actions as the heart or hand of man can be guilty of; and they might as well have called it an impious conscience; when in truth, if it be either impious or erroneous, it ceaseth to be conscience; it is not consistent with any of those destructive epithets, nor receives any ornament from the best which can be annexed to it. Conscience implies goodness and piety, as much as if you call it good and pious. The luxuriant wit of the school-men and the confident fancy of ignorant preachers has so disguised it, that all the extravagancies of a light or a sick brain, and the results of the most corrupt heart, are called the effects of conscience: and to make it the better understood, the conscience shall be called erroneous, or corrupt, or tender, as they have a mind to support or condemn those effects. So that, in truth, they have made conscience a disease fit to be entrusted to the care of the physician every spring and fall, and he is most like to reform and regulate the operation of it. And if the madness and folly of men be

not in a short time reformed, it will be fitter to be confined as a term in physic and in law, than to be used or applied to religion or salvation. Let apothecaries be guided by it in their bills, and merchants in their bargains, and lawyers in managing their causes; in all which cases it may be waited upon by the epithets they think fit to annex to it; it is in great danger to be robbed of the integrity in which it was created, and will not have purity enough to carry men to heaven, or to choose the way thither. It were to be wished, that some pains were taken to purge away that dross, which want of understand, ing, or want of honesty, have annexed to it, that so it may prove a good guide; or that that varnish may be taken from it, which the artifices of ill men have disfigured it with, that it be no longer the most desperate and dangerous seducer: lest conscience of gratitude, for civilities and obligations received, dispose women to be unchaste; and conscience of discourtesies and injuries done, or intended to be done, provoke men to revenge; and no villany that ever entered into the heart of man, but will pretend to be ushered thither by conscience. If it cannot be vindicated from these impure and impious claims, it is pity but it should be expunged

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out of all discourses of religion and honesty, and never mentioned as relating to Christianity: let it be assigned and appropriated to the politicians, to cover their reason of state with, and to disguise all treaties between princes with such expressions, that they be no longer bound by these obligations than they find the observation of them to be for their benefit or convenience; let it be applied only to the cheats and cozenings of this world; to the deceiving of women in marriages; to the overreaching heirs in mortgages and purchases; but let it never be mentioned in order to our salvation in the. next world, or as if it could advance our claim to the kingdom of heaven.

Solomon was the more inexcusable for departing from it, by his knowing what the calm and ease and tranquillity of it was; and he could not express it better than when he says, that "a good conscience is a continual feast." Now there can be. no feast where there is not amity and peace and quiet; a froward, wayward, proud, and quarrelling conscience, can never be a feast, nor a good guest at a feast; therefore it cannot be a good conscience: anger and ill words break up any feast; for mirth, that is of the essence of a feast, and a great part of the good cheer, is banish

ed by any ill humour that appears. It is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast; it was only at the feast of the Centaurs, where they ate with one hand, and had their drawn swords in the other; where there is no peace, there can be no feast. Charity and tenderness is a principal ingredient in this feast: the conscience cannot be too tender, too apprehensive of angrying any man, of grieving any man; the feast is the more decently carried on never interrupted by this tenderness. But if it be tender at some times, scrupulous to some purposes, is startled to do somewhat against which it hath no objection, but that it is not absolutely necessary to be done, and at other times is so rough and boisterous, that it leaps over all bounds, and rushes into actions dishonest and unwarrantable, neither the tenderness nor the presumption hath the least derivation from conscience: and a man in a deep consumption of the lungs can as well run a race, as a tender conscience can lead any man into an action contrary to virtue and piety. It is possible that the frequent appeals that are made upon several occasions to the consciences of ill men, do in truth increase their love of wickedness; that when they are told that their own conscien

ces cannot but accuse them of the ill they do, and they feel no such check or control in themselves, they believe from thence that they do nothing amiss, and so take new courage to prosecute the career they are in: it is a very hard thing to believe, that the worst men can do the worst things without some sense and inward compunction, which is the voice of their conscience; but it is easy to think that they may still and drown that voice, and that by a custom of sinning they may grow so deaf as not to hear that weak voice; that wine may drive away that heaviness that indisposed them to mirth, and ill company may shut out those thoughts which would interrupt it: and yet, alas! conscience is not by this subdued; they have only made an unlucky truce, that it shall not beat up their quarters for some time, till they have surfeited upon the pleasure and the plenty of men; it will disturb and terrify them the more for the repose it hath suffered them to take. If the strength of nature, and the custom of excesses, hath given the debauched person the privilege of not finding any sickness or indisposition from his daily surfeits, after a few years he wonders to find the faculties of his mind and understanding so decayed that he is become a fool, and so much