T IV INCENTIVES FROM A GOOD CONSCIENCE HE strongest Will-tonic is a healthy human conscience. The quickening spring for jaded moral energy is in the depths of one's own nature, fed there by the incessant descent of the moral energy of God into the heart of humanity, as earth's springs are fed from the clouds. There are people who seem devoid of moral impulses. To teach some children the common virtues is like writing on a greased slate. In mission and settlement work we come across men who can hardly be made to believe in others' goodness, presumably from having never felt its impulse themselves. An old man was picked up on the sidewalk where he had fallen, and taken into a house where he was carefully nursed until consciousness returned. He at once started for the door and made his exit, glancing back in fear. A few days later he returned, cautiously inspected the premises, and rang the bell. Confronted by the lady who had befriended him, he demanded to know why he had been taken into this house. Did they want to pick his pockets? He had nothing in them. He shook his head at the explanation, then seemed to be dazed. Was he trying to recollect something far back in the years, something of mother, sister, friend? Was he searching some hitherto unfathomed depth in his own heart, which had been frozen over with many years' experience of “man's inhumanity to man." He burst into tears and went away. Oftentimes men of long career in crime seem to have lost the commonest sentiment of justice. They do not resent their arrest on false accusation, but with nonchalance charge it up to profit and loss in their life business. But those who have charge of the reform side of discipline never despair of in some way finding access to conscience. Over the door of the prison on Blackwell's Island the incoming culprit used to read this sentence from Dante's "Inferno": 'Abandon hope who enter here." The wretched salutation has been taken down as a crime which society perpetrates upon the criminal, and in its stead is the scriptural inscription: "The way of the trangressor is hard." It is hard, but not hopeless, for the moral sense abides. There are subterranean streams beneath the desert. When the great Khaled was making |