When troubled consciences find healing they become a force for good. The conscience, our inner moral compass, is a sensitive instrument meant to warn us against all that might endanger our life and happiness. Many today despise or ignore the conscience, calling its working unhealthy repression of natural urges, or rejecting any certainty in the name of relativism. Others are tormented by its accusations. In this little book, Arnold points the wayto complete healing and restoration of even the most troubled conscience. When Christ's forgiveness sets the conscience free and floods it with his live-renewing spirit, it becomes an active force for good, giving us clarity in personal, social, and political questions and leading us to peace, joy, justice, and community. The Conscienceis the second volumeof five inInner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel. About Inner LandA trusted guideinto the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God. It is hard to exaggerate the significanceofInnerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life-from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the titleWar: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author's study a year before his death (and again a year after it),Innerlandwas not openly critical of Hitler's regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this senseInnerlandstands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author's. At a glance, the focus ofInnerlandseems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes inThe Inner Life: | The Conscience by Eberhard Arnold, Perfect | Indigo Chapters