Ah conscience tutored in the ways of
Rightness
Practised in the ways of
Rectitude
Raging still until each aberration
Is made good
And raging too until
Each thought is
Pure and steady

Ah conscience never satisfied
Working on until
The flesh is limp and
Mind exhausted
Urging on to kingdoms that will
Compensate and camouflage
The lack that still remains

Ah conscience
Meet your Master
Even God
Not with face all stern
And whip in hand
But in the face of Christ
Sin bearer

See there the
Thefts, adulteries and murders
And many lesser crimes
All lovingly embraced and borne
Before the Father’s holy love
Not one wild deed
Omitted
All atoned, all washed
Not one thing left to lurk or spoil
The reconciliation

Conscience
Meet your Maker
Who decreed that love
His love
Be motive all alone
Enough
To move the race to duty
And to zeal.

Make me acknowledge only
My great need of
Love
Exposure to the very heart of God
Pulsating with affections
Great and tender
Tell me when I err
In this respect alone

Do not
Stir up to
Greater deeds to
Compensate, annul or
Catch up with the past
It is against my God
I sin
‘Gainst him alone
And sin against
His loving me
And ‘tis to move against his love
To look for other
Things to change

Ah crime of deepest import
Ah deed of greatest shame
To have thought his love austere
His pleasure hard to gain
And to have turned
To idols
Enamoured so with idols
That his love laid
Unreceived

Tell me of this
Alert me at first sign
And turn your vigilance to
Any wandering from grace

Ah conscience
Be you tutored by the cross
Of Christ
Do not presume to have
A charter outside this
Call sin what God calls sin
That sin to death
Which spurns his grace

Alert me then alone
To seek outpourings of
That love—none else
What business do I have
With deeds which merely satisfy
Convention
Or my longing for
Relationships—patched up and thin
With no true love?
Require of me alone that
I ask, receive, be thankful for, and give
His love.

© Grant Thorpe, July 1991, August 2002