shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ what
leisure for the altar, what time for God?
I appeal to the experience of men engaged in this profession,
whether religious feelings and religious practices
are not, without any speculative disbelief, perpetually
sacrificed to the business of the world?
Are not the habits of devotion gradually displaced
by other habits of solicitude, hurry, and care?
Is not the taste for devotion lessened? Is
not the time for devotion abridged? Are you not
more and more conquered against your warnings
and against your will; not, perhaps, without pain
and compunction, by the Mammon of life? And what
is the cure for this great evil to which your profession
exposes you? The cure is, to keep a sacred
place in your heart, where Almighty God is enshrined,
and where nothing human can enter; to say to the world,
‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no further’;
to remember you are a lawyer, without forgetting
you are a Christian; to wish for no more wealth
than ought to be possessed by an inheritor of the Kingdom
of Heaven; to covet no more honour than is suitable
to a child of God; boldly and bravely to set yourself
limits, and to show to others you have limits,
and that no professional eagerness, and no professional
activity, shall ever induce you to infringe upon
the rules and practices of religion: remember
the text; put the great question really, which
the tempter of Christ only pretended to put. In
the midst of your highest success, in the most
perfect gratification of your vanity, in the most
ample increase of your wealth, fall down at the
feet of Jesus, and say, ’Master, what shall I
do to inherit eternal life?’”
The advocate’s duty to his client, with its resulting risk to the advocate’s own conscience, is thus set forth:—
“Justice is found, experimentally, to be most effectually promoted by the opposite efforts of practised and ingenious men presenting to the selection of an impartial judge the best arguments for the establishment and explanation of truth. It becomes, then, under such an arrangement, the decided duty of an advocate to use all the arguments in his power to defend the cause he has adopted, and to leave the effects of those arguments to the judgment of others. However useful this practice may be for the promotion of public justice, it is not without danger to the individual whose practice it becomes. It is apt to produce a profligate indifference to truth in higher occasions of life, where truth cannot for a moment be trifled with, much less callously trampled on, much less suddenly and totally yielded up to the basest of human motives. It is astonishing what unworthy and inadequate notions men are apt to form of the Christian faith. Christianity does not insist upon duties to an individual, and forget the duties which are owing to the great mass of individuals, which we call our country; it does not teach you how to benefit your neighbour, and leave you to inflict the most