Marion D. Hanks

Is good conscience important? It is a prize beyond expression! And conscience is more than a local standard or the accumulation of the mores and traditions of a community or a society or a generation. Whatever else it is, it is the voice of God speaking to us, inspiring moral obligation. Washington called it “that little spark of celestial fire.” It is true that we can desensitize our conscience, as it were. In the Book of Mormon we read of a group to whom God had spoken “in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling” (1 Ne. 17:45). It is also said that there are those who have become “dead as to things pertaining unto righteousness” (Alma 5:42). As we can desensitize a conscience, so to speak, so we can prepare ourselves better to hear the voice of the Lord by stripping off what the poet called the layers of “muddy vesture and decay,” by ceasing to sin and learning to obey. There is the privilege of learning true values and living to them.