The loss of fortune, dignity, glory, and all the pageantry of earthly
grandeur, is comparatively trifling when put in competition to that of
virtue: when the human mind first stoops to debasement, and wanders in
the paths of impiety, its progress to misery, although gradual, is too
fatally inevitable, the smallest crimes by becoming habitual increase in
time to the crimson tints of attrocity; then O conscience! thou most
incessant and excruciating torturer, thou never failing monitor, ’tis
then thine admonitions wound with remorse the breast of conscious vice;
thou establishest thine awful tribunal on the ruins of neglected virtue,
there to inflict a punishment far more severe than aught invented by the
ingenuity of man.
When lulled in apparent security, and revelling in the round of
transitory pleasure, thine awful presence intrudes itself upon the
harrassed imagination, and bids the lofty sinner reflect on the acts of
injustice of which he has been guilty. The veil of oblivion, which with
all the precaution of vice, he has endeavoured to cast over his crimes,
thou canst in one unguarded moment cause himself to remove; his deeds of
darkness, so cautiously enveloped with the specious garb of
dissimulation and hypocrisy, are frequently by thee laid open to the
scrutinizing eye of justice. His most secret recesses thou canst
penetrate, his every joy embitter, and render him who was once hardened
in iniquity, susceptible to the slightest emotions of fear. The man who
once was callous to the tender plaints of misery and injured innocence,
will, when under thy powerful influence, start at a shadow, tremble at
an “unreal mockery,” and imagine the most trivial sound a solemn summons
of retribution.--Such, O conscience! is the form in which thou visitest
the child of iniquity; such the shape in which thou approachest the
votary of vice; how happy then the man, who void of guile, dreads not
thy reproaches: who, supported by the consciousness of unspotted
innocence, enjoys uninterrupted serenity and peace of mind; whose
slumbers are undisturbed by the phantoms of a disordered imagination,
and who looks forward with the ardour of hope and expectation to the
time when the virtues and vices of mankind shall receive their just
reward.