When God created humanity, he implanted in us something of his own divinity, in the way of a more ardent disposition, with a shining spark of reason to illuminate our minds and teach us the difference between good and evil. This is called conscience, which is the natural law. It was by submitting to this law, that is, the conscience, that the patriarchs and all the faithful in the days before the written law were well-pleasing to God. But since conscience was clogged and trampled on by humanity in general through successive sin, we needed the written law, we needed the holy prophets, and we needed the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ to uncover and waken it, and to bring the buried spark back to life through the observance of his holy commands. So it is now up to us either to keep it buried, or to allow it to shine in us and illuminate us if we obey it. For when our conscience tells us to do something and we ignore it, and it speaks again and we still do nothing but trample on it, we finally bury it, and it can no longer speak clearly to us because of the weight pressing on it.
Let us take the greatest care, then, brothers and sisters, to guard our conscience as long as we live in this world, and not allow it to convict us of any wrongdoing, nor despise it even in the smallest matters for any reason at all. For, as you know, from scorning such small and supposedly unimportant things we are led to despise even great things. Both living a good life and living a life of sin grow from small beginnings, to end in either great good or great evil.
-Saint Dorotheus of Gaza
Saint Dorotheus of Gaza (565) was an abbot and teacher of the spiritual life who founded his own monastery.
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