We shall now pass in review its most
obvious inadequacies.
Do the deliverances of different people's consciences agree?
Nothing is more notorious to an unbiased observer than the
conscientious differences between men. Even among members of a single
community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find
marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely
different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common
ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the
alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light.
Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as
passionately for, their moral convictions as Christians have for
theirs. When we survey the vast amount of material amassed by
anthropologists, we find that, as has been often said, there is hardly
a vice that has not somewhere been deemed a virtue, and hardly a virtue
but has been branded as a vice. History is full of the pathos of havoc
wrought by conscientious men, of foolish and ruinous acts which they
have braced themselves to do for conscience' sake. One has but to think
of the earnest and prayerful inquisitors and persecutors in the
mediaeval Church, of the Puritans destroying the stained-glass windows
and paintings of the Madonna, of the caliph who destroyed the great
Alexandrian library, bereaving the world at one blow of that priceless
culture-inheritance.
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