Editorial February 27, 1926 Issue

"The temple gate of conscience"

Ella W. Hoag

In her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 (p. 18) Mrs. Eddy says, "Be faithful at the temple gate of conscience, wakefully guard it; then thou wilt know when the thief cometh." Our Leader has a great deal to say about conscience in her various writings, and there is no doubt but that it is a subject of vital importance to all Christian Scientists. One definition of it tells us that conscience is a faculty whereby we may "decide as to the moral qualities of one's own thoughts and acts, enjoining what is good."

Conscience is certainly a God-given ability to divide between what is right or wrong in one's own thoughts, motives, and conduct, together with the recognition of an obligation to choose always that which is right. Then its temple gate must be the mental point where all desires, purposes, and intentions may and should be challenged and examined, the good chosen and the evil rejected, before any are allowed to enter our thinking and take up their abode therein.

Most men admit that there is that within them which carefully admonishes and directs them when they are halting between a right and a wrong decision; which brings them a sense of approval when they do right or of condemnation when they do wrong. Conscience is the safeguard God has bestowed upon us whereby we may always—alone with and guided by Him—choose for ourselves between what we believe to be right and wrong, and having thus chosen we can then stand courageously for that which our conscience indicates as our highest understanding of what is nearest right at that time.

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