The fallibility of conscience

The fallibility of conscience is the central argument of the sermon read aloud by Corporal Trim: an accusing conscience can provide grounds for believing a person guilty, but a quiet conscience does not prove innocence. Habit and self-interest can distort moral judgment, so conscience must be tested against religion, morality, reason, justice, and truth rather than treated as an independent authority.

Conscience as an Imperfect Judge

The sermon begins by conceding that knowledge of right and wrong is impressed on the human mind. It then qualifies that confidence. Long habits of sin can harden conscience, as continual stress can dull a sensitive part of the body; self-love can bias judgment, and private interests can cloud the faculties. Affection may enter the inner court, while wit may act as an advocate for an unjustifiable desire. Passion, too, may take the judgment seat and pronounce sentence in reason’s place. Under these conditions, a person’s own approval of their conduct cannot reliably measure their moral or religious state.

The sermon nevertheless distinguishes between an accusation and the absence of one. When conscience accuses, the speaker says, there is ordinarily sufficient ground for the charge, apart from cases of melancholy or hypochondria. But the reverse inference fails: guilt does not always make conscience speak. A quiet mind, therefore, cannot by itself establish innocence. The distinction makes conscience useful as a warning without allowing it to certify a person’s goodness merely because no warning is felt.

Habit, Self-Interest, and Selective Judgment

The sermon explains how conscience can lose its reliability without disappearing altogether. A person tends to judge equally vicious actions differently according to personal inclination: conduct encouraged by habit or desire may be painted in flattering colors, while actions for which the person feels no propensity appear plainly shameful. Conscience’s apparent moral discrimination can thus reflect self-interest rather than a consistent standard.

The sermon illustrates the danger through the biblical contrast between David’s response to cutting the skirt of Saul’s robe and his failure to show remorse after the matter of Uriah. David’s heart smote him for the former act; in the latter, where Uriah was killed to make way for David’s lust, the sermon notes no recorded sorrow during almost a year before Nathan reproved him. The example demonstrates that the intensity of conscience’s response need not correspond to the gravity of the wrongdoing.

A further example concerns a man who openly commits a grave wrong, ruining the woman implicated with him and bringing dishonour and sorrow upon her family, yet is imagined as living without ceaseless reproach. The sermon’s point is not that the wrong is minor, but that conscience may fail to interrupt even serious wrongdoing. A person may also console himself that a sin will be quickly healed by absolution, treating that assurance as peace when it does not establish that the underlying conduct is right.

The Standards That Must Guide Conscience

Because conscience may take imperfect or corrupt account of conduct, the sermon calls for another principle to aid, and sometimes govern, its determinations. A sound judgment of a person’s merit as an honest individual, useful citizen, faithful subject, or servant of God must be tested against the law of God and the obligations of justice and truth, consulted through calm reason. Conscience should decide only after receiving those reports. Its verdict can then support confidence in God not because inward quiet is self-validating, but because judgment has been formed under standards beyond private passion or preference.

The sermon’s distinction between law and conscience makes that limit explicit. God and reason make the law; conscience is placed within a person to determine a case under it. It must not behave like a judge who makes new law according to changing passions, but like a judge who faithfully declares a law already written. The sermon accordingly warns against trusting a person who lacks conscience in every part of life, while also refusing to let conscience’s private verdict replace moral and religious standards.

The Reading and Its Dramatic Frame

The argument reaches the household through Corporal Trim’s reading. He reads the sermon with evident feeling; afterward, he says his heart was too full, and Walter Shandy treats that feeling as the reason the reading succeeded. Dr. Slop, by contrast, objects that Trim would have read better had he spared his comments. The exchange gives the sermon’s moral subject a performed dimension: the reader’s response is visible, while the surrounding listeners react to both the text and its delivery.

The interruptions also keep the sermon from appearing as an entirely disembodied treatise. Dr. Slop falls asleep while it is being read, and Toby Shandy interjects a military qualification to the sermon’s image of a tower. These responses contrast the sermon’s effort to discipline judgment with the varied attention and associations of its hearers. Its close returns to the central issue: conscience matters, but only when informed and governed by standards capable of correcting its errors.