Moral sense

Usage examples of conscience.

She felt more than one pang of conscience as she agreed that Wickham was, indeed, abovestairs at that very moment, and, was moreover, slightly wounded from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot.

Susanna Adams flew into a rage over the fact that Deacon John, in answer to his own conscience and feelings of responsibility as selectman, had brought a destitute young woman to live in the crowded household, the town having no means to provide for her.

Yet as before, Adams remained reluctant to profess his love for her, though it was from the heart that he wrote: May Heaven permit you and me to enjoy the cool of the evening of life in tranquility, undisturbed by the cares of politics and war--and above all with the sweetest of all reflections that neither ambition, nor vanity, nor any base motive, or sordid passion through the whole course of great and terrible events that have attended it, have drawn us aside from the line of duty and the dictates of our consciences.

Only those convicted by the ecclesiastical courts could be anathematised, while excommunication was a matter of conscience and people could in theory excommunicate themselves.

In his long traffic with the Angevin he had never known such sweet commerce between his conscience and his will as that which enabled him to earn merit with heaven by harrying his mortal enemy.

I do not confess anything to him because I did not examine my conscience sufficiently, and I answered him that I had nothing to say, but that if he liked I would commit a few sins for the purpose of having something to tell him in confession.

Hafner and Ardea in evening dress, with buttonhole bouquets, had the open and happy faces of two citizens who had clear consciences.

Having some qualms of conscience, he put on a secular dress, and on nearing Asuncion put his religious habit over it.

Quintus had left him for adventures in the vineyards, but some nagging shred of conscience told Sabinus that he should remain an observer at the bacchanal, not a participant.

This occasioned him to send for a Confessor from the Carthusian monastery, that he might have an opportunity of unburthening his conscience.

Elliot Rose, in Cases of Conscience, published in 1975, the year in which the Vietnam War ended, drew a parallel between Catholics who refused to conform in the reign of Elizabeth and James I, and protesters against the Vietnam War.

The cunning of this science consists in this,--that, after pointing out to men the coarsest false interpretations of the activity of the reason and conscience of man, it destroys in them faith in their own reason and conscience, and assures them that every thing which their reason and conscience say to them, that all that these have said to the loftiest representatives of man heretofore, ever since the world has existed,--that all this is conventional and subjective.

Indeed, it is a convenient thing to looke and plead for safety, when as the conscience doeth confesse the offence, as theeves and malefactors accustome to do.

As if, thought Dolley, his old friends wanted to atone for an action that their Quaker consciences had not quite been able to reconcile with the promptings of the Inner Light.

Their den is in the guilty mind, And Conscience feeds them with despair.