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 serious injuries upon all
whose interest is bound up with you in the same land.
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