If you lose the internal awareness of what is right and what is wrong, it’s very difficult to keep your conscience clean. The guilt builds up. Guilt is like the pain of a toothache. The pain is not the problem, but alerts you to the problem of the tooth. Guilt is not the culprit any more than the pain of the tooth is. To address the pain and not the tooth doesn’t really help. Fix the tooth and the pain goes away. The guilt-burdened soul cries out for proper attention, which brings justice and peace. This is why the soul of a man cannot rest until his conscience has been satisfied by a payment. Like a prosecuting attorney, the conscience will not drop its case until it is sure that justice has been done. 

Guilt is an essential part of our natural moral makeup. Without it we would be like a smoke detector with no alarm. But guilt is a temporary condition to convey a message. It is the soul’s pain, as when touching something hot, designed to give us warning to change our actions. It is a great blessing to feel guilt — a sign of life, a healthy response. If we change the standards to sooth our sense of guilt, do we really erase it, or merely drive it underground?

Although unwelcome at times, guilt can actually be a friend. When each of us faces the judgment someday, we will have no excuse: we knew what is good and what is bad. That is, unless we have ruined our sensitivity by silencing our conscience.