23. When God created man, He planted something
divine into him — a certain conception — a spark that has both light and
warmth. The conception that enlightens the mind and indicates what is right and
what is wrong is called conscience. Conscience is a natural law. Living in
times before any written law, patriarchs and saints pleased God by following
the voice of their conscience.
23. It is in our power to either "bury"
our conscience, or allow it to shine within us and enlighten us through our
subordination to it. Because when our conscience tells us to do something and
we ignore it, or when it advises us to do something and we don’t do it, we
burden it or, as though, bury it so that its voice becomes fainter from the
weight on it. Just like it is impossible to see your reflection in muddy water,
so do we cease to understand what our conscience says to us when we sin consciously. It is even possible to imagine that the
conscience has perished. Nevertheless, there is not one human being that has
lost his conscience, for it is something divine and can never be eradicated
totally.
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