Suneidhsiv, conscience, does not occur in the gospels, unless John viii. 1-11 be admitted into the text. Nor is it a word familiar to classical Greek . A man cannot be conscious of himself without knowing himself as a moral creature. In conscience man stands face to face with himself.
Conscience is, therefore, a law .
Conscience is a faculty. We are entitled, therefore, to hold that the drawing of moral distinctions is not comprehended in the simple exercise of the reason. The conscience, in short, is a different faculty of the mind from the mere understanding. We must hold it to be simple and unresolvable till we fall in with a successful decomposition of it into its elements . In the absence of any such decomposition we hold that there are no simpler elements in the human mind which will yield us the ideas of the morally good and evil , of moral obligation and guilt, of merit and demerit.