For the torments of one’s conscience, when that conscience is functioning as it should be (with a vigilance that is proportionate to the moral responsibilities that belong to a person in a given situation) are not what they are because of anything like a gratuitousness on the part of a deity who, having instilled that conscience in us, would like to see us suffer. Or because some calculus in the spiritual realm demands it, arbitrarily. But because, first of all, sin has its wages, just like virtue, existing as it does within the divine economy from which everything takes its substance, and in which everything participates. So that it will always produce a debt that will be owed, and paid, by the person who willed it and initiated it — for that is a law, spiritually speaking, in the same way that, in physics, there is the law of conservation of energy (it is sustained not by a whim, or a caprice, or anything so personal or mutable, but by a principle that undergirds reality).