It's God on the line

“I just got to wondering,” she said this day. “We say ‘my conscience’ like we’d say ‘my nose’ or ‘my hand.’ And we feel its pain, and its pain, like I say, is its pain, not like any other. But then we don’t know what we’re talking about.”

            “King David’s heart hurts him when he’s been crooked,” he said after a little thought. “Job’s heart tells him ‘You did nothing wrong.’ But old Thomas Aquinas had it figured this way, conscience is really a telephone line. Telephones hadn’t been invented then, of course, but that’s how he described it, man and God hooked up like . . . What he really meant . . . a hot line. Lift the receiver, ‘Man?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘God.’”

     --From Variation West