We may discriminate among the types of perverted conscience:
(1) The fanatical conscience, the meddling conscience, that feels a
mission to stir up trouble. Under this head come the parents who
interfere needlessly with their children's ways when different from
their own, the breakers-up of love-affairs, the fault-finders, the
militantly religious, all that great multitude of men who with prayer
and tears have felt it their duty to override others' wills and impose
their codes upon the world.
(2) The obstructive conscience, that has become set and will not suffer
change. Here we can put all the earnest "stand-patters," who resist
innovation of every sort. Slaves of the particular standards that they
happen to have grown up in, unable to conceive that their individual
brand of religion may not be the ultimate truth, horror-struck at the
suggestion that we should forsake the ways of our fathers, their
conscientious conservatism stands like a rock in the way of progress.
(3) The ascetic conscience, that overemphasizes the need of sacrifice,
and deletes all the positive joy of life for the sake of freedom from
possible pain. This particular misdirection of conscience is not
prominent in contemporary life; but at certain periods, as among
some of the mediaeval saints, or the early Puritans, this hypertrophy
of conscience has been a serious blight.
(4) The anxious conscience, that magnifies trifles and gives us no
rest with its incessant suggestions, lest we forget, lest we forget.
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