1. The primary rule is over conscience. The man who sways a conscience
sways a human life. The man who sways a nation's conscience controls
that nation's life. To rule conscience, a man must himself be
unprejudiced and well informed. He must strive, not to keep up an
unhealthy excitement which shall make conscience introspective and
morbid, but to preserve a sane moral outlook, to encourage freedom of
thought and judgment, and to develop a normal conscience which reacts
promptly against wrong. Conscience measures our inner recoil from evil.
The power of a preacher is in direct proportion to the energy with which
he reveals sin in the heart of man, and wakes his whole nature against
its insidious power.
Sin is. To-day, sin is thought a somewhat brusque word, lacking in
polish. To use it frequently is a mark of lack of '_savoir-faire_!
Indeed to speak of it at all is as archaic as to speak of the
Ichthyosaurus. But sin is a root-fact of the life of man. It is the
office of the spiritual teacher to pluck out sin; to pierce the heart
with a recognition of the enormity of sin, and of its far-reaching
consequences; to stir the seared conscience, rouse the apathetic life,
thrill the spiritual imagination, and to quicken the heart to better
love and to nobler dreams. He rebukes the private sins of individuals
and the public sins of nations. In the _Faerie Queene_, the
"soul-diseased knight" was in a state
"_In which his torment often was so great,
That like a lyon he would cry and rare,
And rend his flesh, and his own synewes eat_."