Guilt is a universal experience.

Everybody at some time or other has had the bad feeling of not doing what he ought to have done.

Even people who say that there is no such thing

as right or wrong, wind up being trapped by the law of God written on their hearts.

They may set out to prove that all ethics are relative and arbitrary and nobody can say what's right or wrong and then they wind up telling

you you better agree with them and think that what they have said is right and if you don't

then you're wrong. No one has ever successfully erased the sense of

aught that God has put in the soul of every human being. Our moral

sensibilities may be so twisted that what we think is right is in fact the very opposite of right, but every

person who exists thinks that some things ought to be done and other things ought not to be done.

And you've all felt what it's like to do things that you know you ought not to have done.

That failure to do what we know we ought to have done we call guilt.

And those rotten miserable feelings that accompany that we call guilt feelings or a bad conscience.

And if our conscience feelings or a bad conscience.

If our conscience is really sensitive, and we see no way out, we might be tempted to commit suicide.

More often, people resort to one or more of three very common devices

used to solve our guilt problem.

One is intellectual means, the other is physical means,

and the other is religious means.

Let me give you an illustration of these.

For example, among the intellectual ways,

there is the teaching that the reason we have so much guilt is because our expectations of our own

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