conscience

night

is often busy in the night-time when the external business of the day prevented her work and claims from being attended to.

Conscience is often busy in the night-time when the external business of the day prevented her work and claims from being attended to. We go about the world in the day time, we see pleasant companions, we are absorbed in earthly schemes, the things of sense are around us, the world is as bright as a rainbow, and it bears for us no marks or predications of the judgment of our sins, and it holds no conversation with us on those subjects, and conscience is retired, as it were, within a far inner circle of the soul. But when it comes night, and the streets are empty, and the lights are out, and the business and dancing and gayety are over, and the pall of sleep is drawn over the senses, and reason and the will are no longer on the watch, then conscience comes out solemnly, and walks about in the silent chambers of the soul, and makes her survey and her comments, and sometimes sits down and sternly reads the record of a life that the waking man would never look into, and the catalogue of crimes that are gathering for the judgment. And as conscience reads and reads aloud, and soliloquizes, you may hear the still deep echo of her voice reverberated through the soul's most secret unveiled recesses. Imagination walks tremblingly behind her.

is contrasted with day in that by day the energies of our being are turned into artificial channels, but by night our thoughts follow the bent that is most natural to them.

By day the energies of our being are turned into artificial channels... by night our thoughts follow the bent that is most natural to them.

George B. CheeverThinkers

George B. Cheever