Yet it is not without significance. There would indeed be a fatal repression, a morbid suppression of all vital impulses, if the conscience were not able to spur the powers of body and soul to positive and creative tasks. Both young people and their parents lack that sense of inner responsibility that puts the whole of life, including all interpersonal relationships, into God s hands. Most people today suffer no pangs of conscience when the soul s deepest need for faithfulness is destroyed. They are affected just as little when the smallest souls that want to be called into life are prevented or annihilated.
Little souls wait in vain to be called out of eternity.
Living human souls wait in vain to be called by constancy and faithfulness. And there seem to be fewer and fewer people in whom the conscience protests clearly and sharply against contempt for the creative spirit, against the profaning of faithfulness and constancy. The inner protest of the conscience calls us to responsibility and faithfulness in our love-lives. The activity of the conscience provides us with our only safeguard against the fall that threatens us, a fall that would make us lower than the animals. The conscience is not repressed but healthy when a person suppresses uncreative and life-thwarting urges toward his own body or the body of his companion.