“And I said, ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

(Isaiah 6:5)

A kidnapped police officer was forced by a bank robber at gun-point to take a 250 mile, horror packed, automobile ride through the Mississippi Delta.  The officer later told of his experience: “I was talking to him all the time . . . but I could hardly get through to him.  He didn’t have any religion or family.  The best thing I had was his girlfriend.”

The trouble the Mississippi law enforcement officer had with the bank robber is very much like the trouble that we are having with ourselves and with each other these days.  We keep talking all the time to each other and to ourselves about the deplorable mounting lawlessness and violence in our land, the fiscal irresponsibility of the public, the crumbling moral standards, the waning patriotism and the scandalously dirty political campaigns, but we have trouble in getting through to accomplish anything with ourselves and others.  Why?  Is it because on the inside of people there isn’t a real religious conviction, or worthy scale of values, or dependable conscience to be appealed to?  Is that the reason for our social malaise?

Waldo Beach in his book, The Christian Life, asserts that the puritan conscience, so pilloried and ridiculed and despised of late in American culture, nevertheless is thought by both its detractors and its praisers to have been the one thing most directly responsible for producing the strong character and “sturdy fabric of early American community life.”

Is that what we need – for want of which America today seems to be deteriorating and wasting away – a “more scrupulous and tender conscience” not only for our political and business leaders but for us private citizens as well?

But what is conscience, anyway?  Ask any five or six people what conscience is and you may get as many different descriptions of conscience.  Some say that conscience is “an innate, radar-like, built-in faculty” that all people come into the world equipped with.  It is furnished us to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and to give us guidance in making decisions.

Others think of conscience as “an inspiration from outside the decision maker – guidance by the Holy Spirit, or a guardian angel, or a Jiminy Cricket.”  Dr. Norman Vincent Peale used to like to cite and recommend the habitual practice of J. Arthur Rank, the prominent British motion picture producer, who would go into his famous “Silences” now and then, sometimes surrounded by 15 or 20 people at a conference table.  Putting every other consideration out of his mind except the question: “Is this right or wrong?” Rank would remain silent for a few moments and then come up with his answer presumably from the outside.  All Rank had to do was to make room on the inside by clearing the decks of his mind and then the message came.

A third popular idea of conscience nowadays is that it is just an internalized value system of the culture and society all around a person.  Man’s conscience then is just an echo of the things most surely believed and valued in one’s particular society – giving us the inner message of how to respond so as to be pleasing and successful in our kind of a world.

A fourth idea of conscience was best put, long ago, by Thomas Aquinas, who said: “Conscience is the reason making moral judgments or value choices.”  This is a definition of conscience that deals with conscience as a function rather than as a faculty.  Joseph Fletcher, a contemporary theologian, said that we have been in error thinking of conscience as a noun rather than as a verb.  “There is not conscience,” writes Fletcher, “Conscience is merely a word for our attempts to make decisions creatively, constructively, fittingly.”

But whether conscience is a faculty or a function of people in their inner life, where thought and reason and emotion and decision take place, certainly all in our time will agree that the conscience of the average American, our own included, needs considerable rehabilitation.  It needs strengthening and sharpening and sensitizing. The pressures of the times, the stepped-up speed of life, the change from inner directed people to others directed people has desensitized and hypnotized and pulverized conscience, so that we as a nation, and as individuals, desperately need revitalization of conscience, whether it is a human faculty or a personality function.

The 6^th Chapter of Isaiah is one of the greatest passages of all scripture. Its message is fundamental to many aspects of the religious life.  Let us look at it today simply as an exposition on the cultivation of the conscience.  Here the four fundamental steps in the cultivation of conscience are clearly laid down.

First, there is the vision of God.  “In the year that King Uzziah died,” writes Isaiah, “I saw the Lord, high and lifted up and his train filled the temple.  And I heard the voices of the seraphic heavenly choir, singing, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.’”

Isaiah caught his glimpse of Ultimate Reality, the primal cause of the cosmos, the germinal center and producer of the whole creation, the originator, the epitome of moral perfection.  The beginning of the cultivation of conscience in man is the vision of God.

But someone complains, “I have had no vision of God.  I have heard no heavenly choirs sing as did Isaiah.  I have encountered no evidence of heaven or hell in my life.  If there is such a spiritual, other-worldly world, I have had no intimation of it.”

Well, what does that prove?  If the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra is playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the program is being broadcast over P.B.S. but my receiving set is not turned on or I’ve got it turned to some silly soap opera, what did I prove when I say that since I cannot hear it, as far as I can tell there is no program, no orchestra, no Ninth Symphony by Beethoven?

Of course, you and I cannot have our vision of God to order. It’s not like flicking on your TV and seeing the image on the tube, nor is it the same thing as paying your admission price at the box office and sitting down to watch the movie.  But you can go regularly for worship where the believing congregation reenacts the drama of God’s mighty acts Sunday after Sunday, and you can kneel reverently in the secret of your home in prayer, and you can search the pages of sacred scripture to find the record of the religious experiences of the saints, and you can begin to move about in your life with the reverent expectancy that God will, in His own good time, confront you there and reveal Himself to you.  Never doubt.  I cannot tell you when or where or how.  It may begin with some fleeting glimpse of what ultimate truth, or eternal love, or lasting beauty really is.  But whatever form your vision may take, it is above you and beyond you, high and lifted up. If for just a moment you have begun to hear and respond to “the beat of a different drummer,” as Thoreau put it, then the cultivation of conscience in response to the vision of God has begun in you.

The second step in the cultivation of conscience is the mounting conviction of unworthiness.  “Woe is me,” cried Isaiah as the vision of the glory and holiness of God swept in upon his soul, “for I am undone. For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclen lips.”

Once a man, expressing himself to his minister in objection to a specific sermon and service of worship, said: “Why, people might go away from church with sensations of guilt.” Why, yes. Exactly. That is fundamental to the purpose of worship: that we might see the Lord, high and lifted up, and glimpse in true eternal perspective our own unworthiness and sinfulness and the tawdry condition of our common life – and feel terrible about it – so awful that we will admit it to ourselves and confess it to our God.

“God can do something with those who see what they are and know their need of cleansing. But God can do nothing with people who can stand before what is holy and not feel themselves unclean.” (Interpreter’s Bible)

The third step in the cultivation of the Christian conscience is the experience of forgiveness. In response to Isaiah’s confession, in his vision, one of the seraphic flew to him and pressed one of the hot stones from the altar to his lips and proclaims; “Thy iniquity is taken away and thy sin is purged.”

The sophisticated and scientific mind of modern man is prone to consider as harmful to man anything that suggests or induces feelings of guilt because it does not know the other side of confession that is forgiveness.  “Christian ethics takes sin seriously, but it also takes seriously the forgiveness of sins, just as beyond judgment lies mercy.” (Waldo Beach, The Christian Life)

The fourth step in the cultivation of conscience, as revealed by the experience of Isaiah, is the dedication of the life redeemed.  When the prophet receives and accepts his forgiveness he hears the heavenly conference: “Whom shall we send and who will go for us?” Only the redeemed of the Lord, those who have glimpsed His glory, and become aware of their own unworthiness, and received and accepted their unmerited forgiveness, only such persons are made aware of heaven’s concern for all the rest of God’s unredeemed children.  They know, and only they, how “there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over 90 and 9 just persons who need no repentance.”

The conscience is tenderized at the point of the horizontal relationships only after being stabbed to a state of awareness to its vertical relationship.  So the prophet cries: “here am I, send me.” “There is no hallowing of the divine name which does not involve as its fruit a sense of moral urgency and a commission to act in keeping with the will of God glimpsed in worship or prayer.” (Ibid.)

Those in church vocations are not the only ones called of God.  Neither is the call always in the form of a mystical experience.  Rather, it is just a sense of vocation brought to a focus of decision.  It is really the culmination of a growing awareness of what one may or ought to do with his or her life.  Some people ask how, in our increasingly impersonal and mass-production assembly-line employment, people can answer the call of God in their life work?  Anyone in any sort of wholesome employment can, when he or she consciously uses every situation and every opportunity for the good of others.

“The conscience of any person, whether that person is a Christian or not, is no fixed quality, or mystical voice within, which always prescribes the correct thing to be done.  Conscience is a pliable and educable reality.  It can be dulled, or finely honed, depending on the care it receives.  In contemporary culture, in comparison with the money spent on technical education or even on liberal education, the expenditures for education of conscience, in school and church, is a pittance.  Most of the mass media in contemporary culture conspire to miseducate the conscience of the average American.  The vulgarization of taste and the cultivation of a crass materialism has produced a nation ‘rich in things and poor in souls,’ peopled by ‘nuclear giants and ethical infants.’ A main task of Christian education today is to stand against the commercial forces that stupefy people’s moral sensitivities, to recover something of the Puritan spirit by the double task of opening each conscience out from its private self concern to a consideration of the pressing needs of the world, and opening each conscience up, through the cultivation of the disciplines of prayer and worship, to the will of God’s order for the disorders of our common life.” (Ibid)