Page:Studies in the Scriptures - Series I - The Plan of the Ages (1909).djvu/125

 mate order, harmony and happiness, we call a right princi- ple ; and the opposite, which is productive of discord, un- happiness and destruction, we call a wrong principle. The results of these principles in a&ion we call goodv&A. evil; and the intelligent being, capable of discerning the right principle from the wrong, and voluntarily governed by the one or the other, we call virtuous or sinful.

This faculty of discerning between right and wrong prin- ciples is called the moral sense, or conscience. It is by this moral sense which God has given to man that we are able to judge of God and to recognize that he is good. It is to this moral sense that God always appeals to prove his right- eousness or justice ; and by the same moral sense Adam could discern sin, or unrighteousness, to be evil, even before he knew all its consequences. The lower orders of God's creatures are not endowed with this moral sense. A dog has some intelligence, but not to this degree, though he may learn that certain a&ions bring the approval and reward of his master, and certain others his disapproval. He might steal or take life, but would not be termed a sinner j or he might protecft property and life, but would not be called virtuous because he is ignorant of the moral quality of his a<5tions.

God could have made mankind devoid of ability to dis- cern between right and wrong, or able only to discern and to do right ; but to have made him so would have been to make merely a living machine, and certainly not a mental image of his Creator. Or he might have made man perfeft and a free agent, as he did, and have guarded him from Satan's temptation. In that case, man's experience being limited to good, he would have been continually liable to suggestions of evil from without, or to ambitions from with- in, which would have made the everlasting future uncertain, a outbreak of disobedience a#4 disprder might al-

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