Book Snippets

Conscience

2 min • Digitized on January 10, 2022

From The Sinner’s Guide, page 164
By Venerable Louis of Granada

CHAPTER XVI.

THE FIFTH PRIVILEGE OF VIRTUE: THE PEACE OF A GOOD CONSCIENCE.

God, Who gives His creatures all that is necessary for their perfection, has planted the seed of virtue in the soul of man, and has endowed him with a natural inclination for good and an instinctive hatred of evil.

This inclination may be weakened and perverted by a habit of vice, but it can never be totally destroyed.

We find a figure of this truth in Job, where we see that, in the calamities which befell the holy man, one servant always escaped to announce the misfortune which had overtaken his master.

So the faithful servant, conscience, always remains with the sinner in the midst of his disorders to show him what he has lost and the state to which his sins have reduced him.

This is still another striking proof of that providence we have been considering, and of the value God attaches to virtue.

He has placed in the centre of our souls a guardian that never sleeps, a monitor that is never silent, a master that never ceases to guide and sustain us.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, was deeply impressed with this truth when he said that “as fathers are wont to entrust their children to a tutor who will prudently guard them from vice and lead them to virtue, so God, after creating man, confides him to the care of that interior guide which stimulates him to virtue and warns him against vice.”