THE LAWYER.
THE
LAWYER. II. Perhaps the Lawyer is exposed to yet greater spiritual peril than the physician, and his need of a better wisdom than man’s is proportionably great. The circumstances in which he is generally consulted render it specially needful that the law of God should be in his heart, and shine as the pole-star of his mind. Men resort to him, smarting under a sense of injury; and the lawyer needs prudence to repress the rising or the rankling desire for revenge. They seek his guidance when threatened by the oppressor; how discreet, then, should he be in his counsels! They may even ask his aid to accomplish some nefarious project—to overreach and defraud; or, to defend some fraud already committed. How prompt, then, should lawyers be to repress such iniquity, that the land may not mourn because blood touches blood! Every trial in this world’s concerns—every dread of loss, of bankruptcy, or imposition, may send the client to the door of his legal adviser; and, amid all these things, if there be a man on earth who needs the control of steadfast, unfaltering truth—a counsellor who is ever near—a wisdom which cannot err—a charity which “seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things”—the lawyer is that man.
MORAL DANGERS.
And yet there is much in his position to bias or to pervert his judgments. Accustomed, at least in some departments of his profession, to various sinister influences, and often more bent on discovering what can be said for a cause than what is true, MORAL
DANGERS. the mind may be so warped as to lose the power of dispassionate decision. It may acquire such a habit of tampering with the truthful, or be so much more anxious to carry a point than to establish a fact, that a kind of subtle Jesuitism may be the result—a habit of perplexing all that is simple, or shrouding in mystery all that is plain.
Moreover, an advocate, while he pleads for the life or the liberty of a client, may not merely feel himself free, but bound, to use every means, to accomplish his object, even though some of them may be tortuous or equivocal. Nay, it may become a point of honour to conceal or perplex the true, and attempt to establish the false. In this manner, the endeavour to keep as near to falsehood as a regard to character, or rather to success, will allow, may foster a habit of mind subversive of all that is lofty or pure in truth. And where shall we find an antidote to that but in the truth which came from heaven—where but in the authority of Him who is the Lord of conscience—where but in the Judge of all, whose law written on the heart, though only partially legible now, taught even a heathen to say, “Fiat Justitia, ruat cœlum?”
SPECIAL PLEADERS.
“THE LICENCE OF COUNSEL.”
The baneful effects of this moral peril are recognised, in common language, by the discredit always thrown upon a Special Pleader, SPECIAL
PLEADERS. now almost a synonyme for meanness, chicanery, and deception. There are, no doubt, many who are above the baseness of fraud, and the dishonesty of a conscious attempt to deceive; but it may fairly be questioned whether it be common to find men, in certain departments of the legal profession, so thoroughly elevated above temptation as not to be exposed to moral peril. Nay, we speak too guardedly on this subject—others have spoken out. “THE LICENCE
OF COUNSEL.” “There are many,” an eminent lawyer has said, “whom it may be needful to remind, that an advocate, by the sacred duty of his connection with his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world—that client, and none other. To serve that client, by all expedient means; to protect that client, at all hazards and costs to all others (even the party already injured), and, amongst others, to himself, is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties. And he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction, which he may bring upon any other. Nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, he must go on, reckless of the consequences, if his fate should unhappily be to involve his country in confusion for his client.”[33]
INIQUITY SYSTEMATIZED.