THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING

"Labor to keep alive in your breast that spark of celestial fire, called Conscience," recommended George Washington to his successors at the close of his public career. This advice found its correlative yesterday afternoon in the text chosen for the Baccalaureate Sermon to the graduating class in Appleton Chapel, the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, "if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness." But President Lowell made opening acknowledgement of the verity that what seems right at one time and meets the apparent approval of the conscience, "the light of the body" that is the eye, often leads to results unforeseen, undesired, and incompatible with the aims of the individual.

Consequences, in their full extent, are not to be perceived or judged by the reason alone. It is in agreement with this aphorism that the undergraduate who convinces himself prominence in a single sport is worth abandonment of his scholastic hopes, the business man who decides in favor of practices yielding immediate profit, the politician who discards platform policies to enter an oil cabal may all be following the path that seems to them the irrefutable correct one Philosophers and moralists, confronted with this ethical dilemma, have had recourse to various phrasings of the Golden Rule, saying that there is a distinction between "I want to" and "I thought", that we cannot escape the fact of conscience, and in effect that we should act as we believe other should act.

President Lowell offers as his suggestion for the preservation of the "undimmed moral sight" something of the sort, saying "we can judge our own conduct and motives as we would those of another." The advantages of acting in accordance with this standard, of holding steadfastly to the judgment of the conscience he sums up in the sentence, "just an exact analysis of self-deception, exact attempt in excuse conduct less than the best tends in so far to dull the vision so every action that is done because a clear light shows that it is the right thing to do lends to increase the light, to sharpen the audience of perception between right and wrong, and thereby to strongthen character.